Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity – By Jennifer Wright Knust [Review of the book <em>Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity</em> by J. W. Knust]
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author argues that accusations of sexual depravity in early Christian literature, whatever their historical value, must be placed in the broader context of Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions in which charges of sexual deviance were stock elements of rhetorical slander. The first chapter, “Sexual Slander and Ancient Invective,” shows the degree to which the discourses of status and gender were intertwined in the Greco-Roman world. In this context, accusations of sexual deviance served the construction and maintenance of an elite identity understood as a male who is able to control his passions and avoid excess. In four subsequent chapters she tracks the Christian appropriation of this rhetorical tradition. In his letters Paul constructs Christians as the only true elites by implying that “the only men truly capable of mastering desire were those ‘in Christ’.” Responding to accusations of sexual depravity, Justin Martyr and other apologists respond in kind, using sexualized slander to portray non-Christians while emphasizing the chastity of Christians. The final two chapters examine the ways in which sexual slander is used by Christians against other Christians in the letters of Jude and 1 Peter, The Shepherd of Hermas, and the heresiological works of Justin the Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyons. A revision of her Columbia University dissertation, this well-written and carefully organized book will certainly be of interest to specialists and graduate students, but could also be appropriate for advanced undergraduates.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it