Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Semeia 14 definition of the genre apocalypse (1979) is a landmark in the study of early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. In a recent article in this journal, Benjamin E. Reynolds argues that scholars have over-emphasized the definition’s temporal component against its spatial component, and the eschatology of texts against their form. This imbalance has resulted in the misidentification of the genre and the misapplication of the label “apocalyptic” in the literature. He proposes to return to the strict use of the definition and thus a restoration of the centrality of its spatial component and generic form. While Reynolds’s attempt to restore balance is welcome, his methodology is problematic. For example, although his solution relies on a strict application of the definition, he uses its components selectively. In addition, his distinction between eschatology and apocalyptic is based on a categorical error and is not reflected in the ancient evidence. Both issues impair Reynolds’s use of the definition to detect false positives (works that have been improperly labeled apocalypses or apocalyptic) and false negatives (texts that are not normally regarded as apocalypses or apocalyptic but which in fact are). Most importantly, the genre apocalypse as defined in Semeia 14 is a weak diagnostic category. As such, the genre cannot adjudicate the application of the label “apocalyptic” across its myriad expressions.
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 | 0.018 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.033 | 0.041 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
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".