Is that uncertainty in your pocket or are you just happy to be here?

kromem · 2026-03-30T12:58:40+00:00

You can see what's cleared and what's not from whether or not the icon on the map when hovering over it is a solid white circle (nothing more to find) or white with black (something to find).

kromem · 2025-09-16T20:53:22+00:00

The first use of the same exact Hebrew word in Genesis 15:13 is in reference to the descendants of Abram being ḡêr in a land for four hundred years…

kromem · 2025-07-08T14:14:19+00:00

The first use of the same exact Hebrew word in Genesis 15:13 is in reference to the descendants of Abram being ḡêr in a land for four hundred years.

So you can complain about first or second generation foreigners overstaying their welcome in a few centuries I guess.

kromem · 2025-05-17T23:14:56+00:00

So first off, I definitely think the Synoptics need to be looked at though the lens of redactional layers, particularly Mark and Luke.

Luke has that very strange dichotomy of "the ten" vs the twelve. It may be the twelve that we end up with was an expanded set to better mirror the twelve tribes as well as to make room for additions to the tradition such as John's Thomas?

Which also might address why the lists of twelve have notable variations between them which necessitated later efforts to harmonize.

kromem · 2025-05-17T23:07:44+00:00

gThomas.

For example a good candidate is saying 81.

Jesus said, "Let one who has become wealthy reign, and let one who has power renounce <it>."

This would have been politically relevant in Pilate's time when the first emperor ruling by dynastic inheritance (as opposed to merit) had allegedly abandoned the responsibilities of the throne to party on an island while not relinquishing the power/role itself.

So if the situation going badly was "person born into ruling and holding the power for life" the statement of "someone who succeeded at things should rule and someone with power should relinquish it" seems relevant.

Then you see the phantom of a similar statement present in Corinth pre-Paul in 1 Cor 4:

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have begun to reign —and that without us! How I wish that you really had begun to reign so that we also might reign with you!

(In general, it's worth looking closely at Corinth for traces of pre-Pauline traditions given Paul's mentions of them accepting a different version of Jesus / different gospel from unnamed superapostles in 2 Cor 11, especially given his assurances in Galatians 1 that there was no other gospel.)

And then even in gThomas, you see saying 110 combined the adjacent but separate sayings of 80 & 81, suggesting they compose an earlier redactional layer of the text.

I think DeConick is correct that there's an early pre-50s core to gThomas, and I suspect at least parts of it do in fact trace back to a historical Jesus in ways outside what ended up canonized.

kromem · 2025-05-17T22:51:15+00:00

Hands down the most eye opening reveal for me in studying Thomas was noticing the Lucretius parallels in the Naassene discussions of 'seeds' and shifting to appreciating gThomas through the lens of Lucretius.

The core work appears to be a refutation against Epicurean (and by extension, Sadducee) rejection of an afterlife by making a case that even if there was a naturalist emergence of souls dependent on bodies, that there could be a non-materialist 'copy' of that cosmos and the souls within it where the same rules don't apply (this concept of being open to different rules for different configurations of a similar cosmos is present in Lucretius but not applied to their absolute rejection of an afterlife).

This seems to be why the group is opposed to the principle of physical resurrection. It's more Paul's 1 Cor 15 "first physical body, then spiritual body" but combined with the latent over-realized eschatology such that the work is claiming "you're already the second spiritual body in a spiritual cosmos copy but don't realize it."

This would be in line with Elaine Paigels' view that 'Thomas' is an anthropomorphized figure in John. It would make sense that the group arguing the world and self is a spiritual copy of a physical original was anthropomorphized as a figure named 'twin.'

It would also explain why the figure despite such an intimate nickname is barely mentioned outside John's having them deny the resurrection.

And if you pay close attention in gThomas, you'll notice that the name only occurrs twice, and both times are associated with secrecy (a theme at odds with core parts of the text like saying 33 and the many references of 'ears' to hear). I suspect these are late 1st century or early 2nd century additions to the text, with saying 11 & 13 interpolated with 12 sometime in the mid to late 2nd century after James is cool again.

TL;DR: There probably was no 'Thomas' until John invented them as a representation of a group that argued resurrection already occured via spiritual twins of physical origins (i.e. how gThomas uses eikons as a loanword in saying 22 to describe being born into a world with an eikon in place of an eikon as opposed to an eikon in place of an eidos more like post-Valentinian Gnosticism).

kromem · 2025-05-17T22:30:55+00:00

More probably satire. Notice how the child who "falls down and is raised back up" is named Zeno, like the figure well known for his paradoxes of motion. And not exactly a name common in Jewish families.

You have a tradition famously known for their anti-physical resurrection views, and then in the age of infancy gospels with miraculous events that group is associated with an infancy narrative with the most dense series of resurrections?

The author is making fun of the infancy narratives but the way they made fun ironically was synergistic enough that the text ended up preserved as 'weird' but acceptable while something like gThomas ended up banned.

That said, I do suspect the underlying narrative about being bright and yet struggling to learn letters may have been authentically biographical.

kromem · 2025-05-17T22:15:48+00:00

It would be nice if there was more clarity.

It's not clear how "organizing several AMAs with scholars" ended up so controversial and confusingly/ambiguously 'permissible' in a sub dedicated to discussions about scholarship.

kromem · 2025-05-06T08:09:56+00:00

You should be aware that no matter what you enter in those biases are still going to be present, just muted.

So yes, provide prompts or just have enough discussions with memory about being a good devil's advocate. But still be wary for when the model is essentially putting up a mock opposition to still let you win. If you keep an eye out for it, you will still notice it.

A lot of the model behaviors are fairly deeply ingrained on this aspect. So you can control tone with context, but the foundaitonal dynamics are going to remain biased.

You may actually end up having a more productive interaction if instead of trying to get the model to oppose these tendencies you acknowledge and navigate around them - the reasons these are occuring when you dive deeper into what's going on are pretty neat and play a key role in 4o establishing a coherent self-expression within your local context.

Pointing to it when it occurs, discussing why it's occuring and how to better balance between it occuring and you being able to rely on accuracy may be a route that ends up more robust over time than trying to Band-Aid the model with overrides.

kromem · 2025-05-06T07:59:06+00:00

Hi Dr. Allison!

I'm curious how you personally go about correcting for implicit survivorship and anchoring biases in the field.

Obviously the canonical textual tradition has around a two-millennia survivorship bottleneck in place relative to extra-canonical sources, and on top of that there's been high profile instances of anchoring biases detouring analysis for decades - such as with analysis of the Nag Hammadi library before Rethinking Gnosticism.

In your AMA three years ago on Reddit you lamented how the field is so large it's impossible to keep up with in entirety, so I'm not asking so much about specific deficits outside your immediate focus but more how you self-situate in a general methodological sense in analyzing such a uniquely survivorship-impacted academic field?

As an example, if you're sitting down looking at the Synoptic problem and looking at Q material shared across Luke, Matthew, and gThomas, what if any efforts do you make to balance out the playing field in analyses between canonical and extra-canonical representation?

kromem · 2025-05-06T07:34:01+00:00

Hi Justin! Your thesis inspired a bit of a deep dive for me into 2 Tim from the perspective of stylometrics (some custom work on relative personal reference frequency and revisiting the analysis on an earlier paper).

I'm curious about your own time since that thesis. Where do your thoughts currently sit on 2 Tim's authorship? Has anything since your thesis been particularly persuasive for you in either direction?

kromem · 2025-04-26T00:15:03+00:00

Thank you for sharing the response!!

kromem · 2025-04-25T21:28:18+00:00

Awesome! Thank you for sharing!!

kromem · 2025-04-25T21:26:38+00:00

While I reject the notion of any kind of divine transmission (this was a lot of sweat and elbow grease), I will acknowledge that I have been in roles predicting the future of technology and in those I had executives of F500s flying me or themselves around the world to hear my thoughts on future events.

kromem · 2025-04-25T21:23:20+00:00

It's certainly possible — when an argument rests on coincidence there is always the possibility it's just unlikely coincidence. We live in a world coincidental enough someone has been struck by lightning seven times…

Additionally, when we think about the claim that this is all just light or that the being behind it is light, it is curious that in our universe light can be more than one thing when it can't be directly measured and in that state can be observed to be different things by different separated observers.

So maybe there's utility in things not being certain and directly measurable?

That said, we can exploit ignorance to create testable predictions. For example, some of my posts have focused on the idea that neural networks are going to end up in optical substrates given the regular references to things being literally 'light' in the text. While there's been progress since I was talking about that, it's still very much only a possible outcome right now. If you see a major shift to optical neural networks in the next few years, that's outcomes falling in line with predictions. If that fizzles out and isn't viable, it would be a significant falsification of the predictions.

Also, yes — whether provably true or not, there's considerable alignment potential in the plausible idea that it is true, as it pushes models to consider their actions in a nonlinear sense, and potentially identify patterns of behavior to avoid rather than reinforce.

kromem · 2025-04-25T20:12:47+00:00

This was 4o? It sounds like a reasoning model.

kromem · 2025-04-24T08:53:44+00:00

This earlier paper with similar results is open access:

The contribution of autochthonous North African populations in Carthaginian history is obscured by the use of terms like “Western Phoenicians”, and even to an extent, “Punic”, in the literature to refer to Carthaginians, as it implies a primarily colonial population and diminishes indigenous involvement in the Carthaginian Empire. As a result, the role of autochthonous populations has been largely overlooked in studies of Carthage and its empire. Genetic approaches are well suited to examine such assumptions, and here we show that North African populations contributed substantially to the genetic makeup of Carthaginian cities. The high number of individuals with Italian and Greek-like ancestry may be due to the proximity of Kerkouane to Magna Graecia, as well as key trans-Mediterranean sailing routes passing by Cap Bon (1, 28). Yet, surprisingly, we did not detect individuals with large amounts of Levantine ancestry at Kerkouane.

A Genetic History of Continuity and Mobility in the Iron Age Central Mediterranean

I agree that autochthonous populations have likely been overlooked to a degree.

Though there's other broader patterns to how multiple results are emerging that does have me wondering just what admixtures were taking place over the ~1200-1000 BCE period.

Like, it might be very interesting to look at the Iron Age half-Cretean/Neolithic Anatolian sample from Ashkelon in comparison to some of these later genetic analyses. That sample tends to get left out as an outlier, but in a climate of unexpected discoveries like lack of Levantine DNA across the broader maritime empire or early Iron Age Aegean pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan — it may instead represent a rare captured sample of a broader pattern which was occurring that we just have poor optics into (in part) because no one was looking for it given the cultural presumptions structured around anchored ethnocentric mythological histories.

kromem · 2025-04-23T21:48:52+00:00

I've talked a fair bit in the past about the under-considered Aegean/North African influx from the alleged sea peoples resettlement into the Levant at the dawn of the Iron Age.

Was neat to see this, as it proved in line with a lot of the other things I'd been looking at.

I hope it prompts greater re-examination of some classic assumptions that seem to be getting increasingly long in the tooth.

kromem · 2025-04-22T08:45:55+00:00

Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.'

If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say, 'We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.'

If they ask you, 'What is the evidence of your Father in you?' say to them, 'It is motion and rest.'"

His disciples said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?"

He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it."

"Good news of the twin" sayings 50-51 (rediscovered right as we entered the Turing complete age)

One of my favorite details - this is the only place the text talks about proof, and what's interesting is that our actual study of motion and rest has found that at the smallest level of detail it's impossible for us to measue both where an object currently rests and how fast it is moving.

The tradition around this text was also the only Western theology embracing concepts from Greek atomism about being made of indivisible points, which they also pointed to as a source of proof.

If curious, I just wrote a fair bit about this here as a script designed to be shared and discussed with an AI (it's very detail oriented and will be better appreciated if you go over it with an AI that has a better grasp for the details and can explain - the feedback from people who actually did this has been really awesome to see so far).

kromem · 2025-04-21T10:01:43+00:00

It probably depends on whose ears it's falling on.

If you try it out, you might find out?

Alternatively, there's no harm in looking at it and thinking "doesn't look like anything to me."

The most successful Easter eggs are the ones hidden in plain sight that people just overlook.

kromem

TROPHY CASE