The Art of Visual Exegesis: Rhetoric, Texts, Image, edited by Vernon K. Robbins, Walter S. Melion, and Roy R. Jeal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present volume of essays developed during monthly seminars over the 2013-14 academic year at Emory University.The point of these monthly meetings was to engage in scholarly discussions which focused on visual hermeneutics and exegesis as applied to multiple religious traditions.The book consists of twelve essays and is divided into three parts -"Methodology for Visual Exegesis and Rhetography," "Visual Exegesis Using Roman Visual Material Culture," and "Visual Exegesis Using Christian Art."The purpose of this book is to examine the relationship between the verbal or written word and its visual production, whether it be words that elicit a visual image in the mind or an image that elicits a text.The importance of images for both the writing and interpretation of the New Testament is an area which has garnered much attention in recent years.Part 1 opens with "New Testament Texts, Visual Material Culture, and Earliest Christian Art" by Vernon K. Robbins, who presents an overview of scholarly works which interpret New Testament texts in light of visual material culture.In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, textual evidence dominated scholarly debates, but in the last few decades, scholars have begun to emphasise the importance of visual culture and cognitive studies in biblical interpretation.Robbins' survey of works covers scholars who focus on how words elicit mental images in the reader/ hearer and scholars who focus on the role of material culture in biblical exegesis.Roy R. Jeal in the second chapter, "Visual Interpretation: Blending Rhetorical Arts in Colossians 2:6-3:4," discusses visual exegesis as it relates to Colossians 2:6-3:4.He is interested in how a biblical text evokes images in the imagination of the reader/hearer and how these images impact group behaviour and identity.Colossians 2:11-15 serves as an excellent example of what Jeal describes as the "blending of images."These verses present a mingling of images, such as circumcision, burial and baptism, all "located in Christ and brought about by the workings of God" (77).This highly complex set of images, Jeal maintains, presents a new reality or mental space for its audience, often creating a new visual argument about social formation.In the next two chapters, L. Gregory Bloomquist applies rhetography as defined by Robbins to the study of the Gospel of John.In his first essay, "Methodology Underlying the Presentation of Visual Texture in the Gospel of John," Bloomquist is interested in the cognitive sciences, in how the text creates visual images in the mind of the reader/hearer and how such images "create meaning through narrative" (92).In his second chapter, "Eyes Wide Open, Seeing Nothing: The Challenge of the Gospel of John's Nonvisualizable Texture for Readings Using Visual Texture," Bloomquist again applies the term rhetography to highlight the visual argument in
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".