Practicing Safe Sects: Apostasy and Apotropaism in the Damascus Document and Paul
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous scholarship on 1 Corinthians 5.1–5 has primarily used parallels from the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) and curse formulae (defixiones) to understand Paul’s instructions about delivering a sexually immoral man over to Satan. This paper diverges from such an approach, instead looking at apotropaism in Second Temple Jewish literature and a parallel found in the Damascus Document that concerns a man excommunicated from the community due to sin done while in a state of spirit-possession. Obedience is often viewed in Second Temple Judaism as a method for repelling evil spirits and Paul seems to adopt a similar view. Additionally, the author(s) of the Damascus Document differentiate(s) between states of disobedience and apostasy. While apostasy incurs the death penalty, disobedience to Sabbath observance results in excommunication with the hope of remediation back into the community. Paul too seems to accept this dichotomy between apostasy and disobedience, but remediation is not possible for the sexually immoral man. Rather, his death serves to protect the spirit of the community from moral degradation and the ongoing threat of hostile spiritual forces.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".