Reappraisal of Contra Apionem 2.145 as an Original Contribution to Political Thought
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For a brief moment in some limited intellectual circles of early modem Europe, Flavius Josephus was considered the most important ancient authority on politics.This may seem odd to contemporary sensibilities since Josephus is now considered a non-entity in terms of political thought.Recent scholarship, however, has brought to the fore a community of early modem theorists for whom Josephus was the crucial figure in understanding the political structure of the divinely ordered "Hebrew republic".2These thinkers believed that Josephus' coinage of the term 'theocracy' (θεοκραηα) grasped something important concerning the true nature of political sovereignty, and that Josephus himself held the key to understanding the best-ordered state.It may seem odd that ideas of such magnitude should be credited to a man not often invoked today as a theoretician, but perhaps the fault lies in the bias of contemporary historians where questions of apologetics are concerned.The task of this article will be to reassess Josephus' possible role as a political theorist, primarily by presenting his attempts to re-imagine the political future of his people in the wake of national catastrophe.Special attention will be paid to his attempt to restructure the relationship between religion and political power in his account of the Jewish constitution (πολιτεια).Τῆε latter will be read against the historical/literary context of its time and place.It is hoped that this method may suggest a new Josephus, one more political and theoretical than has yet been widely acknowledged and one perhaps as innovative as the early modern "political Hebraists" thought him to be, though for very different reasons.3
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| 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".