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Record W4380606659 · doi:10.1163/15700747-04501006

The Holy Spirit before Christianity , by John R. Levison

2023· article· en· W4380606659 on OpenAlexaff
Steven Edward Harris

Bibliographic record

VenuePneuma · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicBiblical Studies and Interpretation
Canadian institutionsHorizon College and Seminary
Fundersnot available
KeywordsChristianityPhilosophyTheologyHistory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This dense and compellingly-written study is John Levison's latest contribution to questions of the origins, humanly-speaking, of the Holy Spirit.Previous scholarly monographs include The Spirit in First-Century Judaism (Brill, 2002) and Filled with the Spirit (Eerdmans, 2009).In this volume, Levison meticulously traces how Isaiah 63:7-14 and Haggai 2:4-5 reinterpret exodus texts to make the Holy Spirit-absent from Exodus itself-the divine agent of that event.This is a key development in the history of pneumatology, one that demands, so Levison argues, that Christians see its origins not in Christianity but already in early Judaism.The book is broken down into five deceptively short but dense chapters (totaling only 122 pages) followed by thirteen excurses dealing mainly with critical issues of exegesis and dating (123-154).Chapter 1 begins by situating Levison's approach within the history-ofreligions school.Whereas Leisegang argued a century ago that the concept of the Holy Spirit emerged from Greek religion and philosophy, Levison adopts the same methodology to prove the opposite conclusion: it is a product not of Greek but of Jewish religion, specifically, of sixth-century bc Israelite prophets.Chapter 2 goes further back, however, since the prophets are themselves recasting exodus traditions.Significantly, for Levison's purposes, these narratives name a succession of agents who act to deliver Israel.There are: the pillars of cloud and fire (e.g., Exod.13:21-22); the angel who goes with them (e.g., Exod.14:19-20), to hear whom is to hear yhwh (Exod.23:20-24); the pānîm, rendered "presence-face" by Levison, of yhwh (Exod.33:14-15); and the cloud (Exod.40:34-38).The characteristics and actions of these agents overlap in various texts (29)(30).Chapter 3 focuses on Isaiah 63:7-14.Here a twofold "Where?" laments the current absence of God's presence that was so evident in the exodus.In the prophet's refashioning of the exodus narrative, however, the angel and the presence-face are merged into a novel "angel of the presence" (33-34), then immediately identified by Isaiah with the "Holy Spirit" against whom Israel rebelled.Chapter 4 focuses on the striking promise of Haggai 2:4-5, "my spirit stands among you."Haggai encourages the people to the rebuilding of the Temple by this unique promise of divine presence that echoes the exodus.In scripture, the Spirit "rushes upon" or "rests upon" or "is poured out upon" individuals (68-73), but is never elsewhere said to "stand."Levison argues, convincingly to my mind, that this is a reminiscence of the cloud that "stood" between Israel and Egypt ).

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.020

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0050.008
Scholarly communication0.0050.005
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.027
GPT teacher head0.248
Teacher spread0.221 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations0
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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