Christianity Appears First as Itself: Alain Badiou and the Study of Christian Origins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation introduces the philosophy of Alain Badiou into conversation with the academic discourse known as “Christian Origins.” The dissertation functions on the assumption that Christianity is an event-based subjectivity and therefore benefits from an event-based philosophy to think through its conditions. In this way, I locate the emergence of Christianity directly with the proclamation of its primal event, and not with later institutional formulations, separating the topic of emergence from traditional patterns of belief. While it is possible to study early Christianity without reference to exceptional events, I map out a relationship between Christianity’s primal event and the appearance of early Christianity as a distinct yet diverse political body. In doing this, the event may serve as a helpful organizing principle with which to map out the development of early Christianity as a distinct subjective group, providing greater insight into the diversity of Christ groups as they seek to maintain fidelity to an event they believe happened. Christ groups form, prophets compete, theologies develop or die—but not for nothing—they organize as a consequence of the event. The dissertation begins with a history of scholarship, noting how the discourse of Christian Origins has been configured in two main strategies: Hegelian rationalism and Nietzschean genealogical method. Both methods diminish the category of the event in the study of Christian Origins, leaving the scholar to choose between Christian Apologetic accounts of origins, or deconstruction. The second chapter introduces the philosophy of Alain Badiou, as it pertains to the study of Christian Origins. Though not a Christian theologian, Badiou’s rigorous account of truth and its conditions (based on events) is found to be a helpful model from which to construct a theory of Christian Origins. Chapter three maps out the work of Badiou onto the book of Revelation, as a “case study” for the trajectory of an event. In this case study, I map out Badiou’s conceptual framework onto the book of Revelation, with interesting results. The conclusion chapter investigates trajectories for both the formal study of religion and also trajectories for theological studies, as they pertain to Badiou’s ontology.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".