Tragedy in the Gospel of Mark
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Can we read the Gospel of Mark as tragedy? How so? With what limits? With what results? I depart from previous explorations of these questions by rejecting their definition of tragedy as a work faithful to the dramatic conventions described in Aristotle's Poetics. I build instead on Aristotle's essential definition of tragedy as a work that inspires fear and pity in an audience. Using a narrative-critical approach, which allows a focus on the effects generated by Mark's plot and characters, I conclude that Mark, while more tragic than Matthew, is not clearly tragic or comic: the gospel maintains a careful balance of tragic and comic possibilities, challenging the reader to appropriate the story in her own world and tip the scales towards the comic. The effect of the text, however, is dependent on audience; Matthew's rewriting of and Papias' comments on Mark demonstrate that contemporary readers probably did not perceive Mark as tragic.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".