Abraham and the Jerusalem Collection: Kinship Diplomacy in Paul’s Letters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Individually, the Jerusalem collection and Paul’s discourse on Abraham are each quite uncharacteristic of their time. Myths of kinship between Jews and followers of Christ did not circulate frequently in the first century, nor were they necessary for making intelligible a foreign god to non-Jews. Paul employed a much more common strategy in that regard (see, e.g., Rom 3:29). The Jerusalem collection, moreover, is currently without a precise ancient parallel. So far, all proposed civic and collegium analogies show that donors usually lived near the beneficiaries or, in the case of collections for the Jerusalem temple, shared an ethnic identity. Despite difficulties in framing Paul’s Abrahamic myth and the Jerusalem collection individually, these elements become intelligible when studied together and placed in the context of Hellenic kinship diplomacy—so I propose in this study. The richest surviving documentation of kinship diplomacy is on the Xanthian stone (Bousquet, REG 101 [1988]: 14–16 = SEG 38.1476). As a framework for making comprehensible Paul’s discourse on Abraham and the Jerusalem collection, I offer an overview of the 110-line Xanthian inscription and compare it to Paul’s ambassadorial role with the Jerusalem assembly. The Appendix provides a full English translation.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".