Paul’s Iconic Christ among Mediterranean Cult Statues: A Comparison of Divine Images
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While scholars continue to debate whether Paul ever explicitly called the messiah a god, there can be no question that he called the messiah an image of a god (2 Cor. 4.4). Even so, there has been no shortage of comparative studies that situate Paul’s messiah among ancient Mediterranean gods, including the Jewish god himself, whereas what is arguably more proximate comparanda for Paul’s iconic claims tend not to be taken into consideration, namely, ancient Mediterranean images of gods. Taking for granted that Paul’s god—the Jewish god—was a Mediterranean god among others, in this article I redescribe Paul’s messiah as a Mediterranean cult image among others. By exploring the relation between gods and their images, between divinity and materiality, with images of gods as material media that make present the gods they image, new light is cast on the debated relation between the Jewish god and his christological image in Paul’s letters.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".