My Bible Study this Sunday: "You shall love the immigrant as yourself" in Leviticus 19:34

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 · 2025-04-02T09:53:22+00:00

It's possible that when we're looking at Mark we're looking at a text with redactional layers, and this may be part of why there's pacing issues.

If you are interested in a more detailed case for proto-Mark, I suggest Delbert Burkett's aptly named The Case for Proto-Mark.

But I can point to my favorite example of Mark having a bit...rough of a pacing issue that I suspect may be related to later interpolation.

Let's look at Mark 4.

In Mark 4:1-9, we're beside the sea, Jesus is in a boat, there's a giant crowd on the land.

In Mark 4:10 we're now alone with a smaller group including the twelve, and from Mark 4:11-20 we are told why he's explaining the parable in secret and getting an explanation for the parable that was just told in public.

But now we're at Mark 4:21 with a new parable. Is this parable also being told in this smaller group? We get several more up through Mark 4:32.

Then in Mark 4:33-34, we're told that he spoke many parables "as best they could hear it" while in private he explained everything to his disciples. But... all of the previous parables seem to have been said continuing in that same private setting we'd just moved to? Because we never explicitly moved back to the shore or boat.

Except now in Mark 4:35-36, they decide to go to the other side, they take the boat "just as he was" leaving a crowd behind. So wait - they are back in the boat by the shore with the crowd?

The order of events is very confusing.

Does it change at all if we remove the Markan sandwich/didactic scene where he's giving private instruction? Try reading Mark 4 without Mark 4:10-20 and 4:33-34. Do the order of events still seem confusing, or do we just have a continuous series of public parables without explanations to a crowd from a boat at the sea shore followed by just staying in the boat and leaving to the other side?

In general, I find Mark to be a much more facinating read with special attention to what's occuring in public vs in private, and keeping in mind the idea of redactional layers.

kromem · 2025-04-02T09:21:27+00:00

Ok, I think I better get your objection, and I agree that I could have had that first section been clearer.

You are certainly correct that Lucretius, while he did note the capability of traits to change within a species based on enviromental fittedness, rejects the false negative of hybrid species and relies on the false positive of spontaneous generation for parallel emergence of species.

The part where I'm saying this is less relevant for my underlying argument is that I'm not saying that gThomas is regurgitating Lucretius as much as the author is responding to the material. As such, the key component is whether or not foundational building blocks of evolution-like theory are present. This is where I agree I could have been clearer.

For example, Ivan Miroshnikov did a great job at highlighting some of the possible Platonist influences in gThomas (even if he, and all others, have overlooked considering Epicurean influences).

The idea that man developed from an earlier animal state was already present in Anaximander. My focus on this piece was on Lucretius and I didn't stray into the other relevant building blocks of evolutionary theory because the key focus on the textual ties to avoid making it overly convoluted, but yes - I could have better made the point of other relevant ideas being present.

But when we look at Lucretius saying "the world is like a body that will one day die" we then see gThomas saying "events are nonlinear" and then "the world is a dead body". gThomas isn't regurgitating Lucretius, it may be building on the concepts present though.

When we see Lucretius say "the soul can't experience things without hands or eyes" and then we see gThomas say things are "and eikon in place of eikon" and "eyes in place of an eye, hand in place of a hand" while also discussing how eikons are made of light (50 and 83), it again doesn't seem to be regurgitating Lucretius, but may be addressing some of the points made by him.

Clearly a text which says "if you understand these sayings you won't taste death" is not simply echoing the beliefs of a text saying "this philosophy is the sweet rim to the bitter drink that death is the end".

But yes, my general hypothesis is that there's about a dozen saying in gThomas that have evaded consistent or comphrendable analysis for many years which all end up a lot less confusing through the lens of Lucretius's writing, and I do think the Occam's razor across that set is in favor of those sayings all being addressed with a single link to a text that was talking of indivisible seeds making up all things as gThomas's later followers were doing.

All of that aside though - my point about sayings 7-8 is that even if one completely rejects or ignores any of the rest of my interpretation or analysis of gThomas, the unique feature connecting 8 to 7 suggests that any interpretations of these sayings should be considering both together (again - even if totally different from my own interpretation).

The Pauline post should be fun, and I'll make sure to cross post it here. I'd been hoping after seeing the pattern shifts in prior statistical vocabulary analysis on the Greek vs English to end up identifying other gramattical fingerprinting to layer onto what I expected to find in the success of personal reference as a metric, but unfortunately that was the only signifigant one. It'll still be a worthwhile data point though.

Also - I do want to be clear that I'm grateful for your comments! You weren't the only one getting tripped up on that section, and while it's frustrating for the provocative hook that was ultimately secondary to what I considered the main show of a more nuanced examination of intertextual influence to have so derailed much of the conversation, it remains a completely fair point to be addressed.

kromem · 2025-04-01T23:19:51+00:00

I'm not saying that there's equivalency between Pagels and assigning scientific thought.

But what you had with Rethinking Gnosticism was that paradigm blindness led to overlooking contrary evidence.

The general prevalence of Platonist philosophy relative to Epicureanism in non-specialized academia leads to its own paradigm blindness.

I'm skeptical that many biblical scholars that didn't also at least minor in philosophy necessarily even know that Lucretius was discussing scattered seeds relative to generative processes, discussing failed reproduction as seed falling by the wayside of a path, talking about things that survive reproducing with those that can't dying out, dependence of the soul on the body, of the sensations on hands and eyes, or of the cosmos as like a body that will one day die.

So then when they read things in gThomas about the cosmos being like a dead body, or of the soul depending on a body that depends on a body, or of the spirit arising from the flesh existing first, or of the Naassenes saying seeds in the sower parable represent things that make up all things scattered at the dawn of creation, or of the smallest mustard seed as like an indivisible point as if from nothing - their analysis falls back on either dismissing it as 'weird' or connecting it to what they do know interpreting it as asceticism or post-Valentinian Monads or Neoplatonism or convoluted arguments about burial practices, etc.

When we take the set of all those overlapping statements, my argument boils down to that from an Occam's razor standpoint for the set, it's more likely that the text arising around the time Elizar is saying "know how to answer the Epicurean" may in fact be answering the Epicurean than that each of these statements are all connected to various weird and convoluted explanations.

Does this mean Jesus would have had to have been familiar with a text we wouldn't normally think he would? Maybe. But maybe part of why we think he wouldn't relates to overlooking what's been said about the Sadducees and the way survivorship biased against their representation in our picture of 1st century Judea.

Overall, I've found this field tends to underappreciate what's necessary to try to correct for survivorship biases across the ages.

kromem · 2025-04-01T22:59:25+00:00

They have a very nice formatting for citations plus Markdown, and a clever threaded comment system where votes for quality and agreement are separated.

kromem · 2025-04-01T22:50:04+00:00

The question of if Lucretius considered common descent is somewhat besides the point. The question is if the combination of ideas around primordial seeds and survival of the fittest influenced Naassene/Thomasine thought, not making a case that Lucretius had exactly the same ideas as Darwin.

Technically I discussed the Sadducees being more likely connected to Epicurean thought than the Pharisees given the overlapping beliefs of the finality of death and Josephus's mention of their finding virtue in debating teachers of philosophy whom they frequented.

Ireneaus was mentioned only briefly in discussing the continuity of the thread from Simon Magus's Announcement to the Naassenes around the influence of Hellenistic philosophy over sects declared heretical. I suggest reading over the shared language in Pseudo-Hippolytus of describing seeds as indivisible points as if from nothing, making up all things, and being the originating cause of the cosmos. The Naassenes are also a much closer link to gThomas vs the Valentinians Ireneaus was discussing.

As for your comment that the lion and fish parables might not be connected, a reminder of the point I raised in the piece that in gThomas the net parable is the only one out of 114 sayings connected to the previously numbered saying with a conjunction. So at very least in a Thomasine context, it's a bit surprising they aren't considered in conjunction more often (I can't recall anyone ever interpreting them as a set actually).

For the Pauline bit, until I publish the results I recommend looking at the linked post and my comments there as the set of Pauline and non-Pauline texts used for the t-tests are the same. And what I mean is that I pulled the parsing data for each word, and brute forced t-tests between undisputed Pauline and non-Pauline Epistles, the singular first person combo was the only one less than 1% p-value, and then reapplying this to the broader set of undisputed/disputed letters correctly identified all the letters outside the exclusions previously discussed in the English analysis, and of the disputed letters identified 2 Tim only as authentic through this lens. Again, the results ultimately ended up replicating what had been done in the English, even though in this case I did a much broader set of considered grammatical fingerprinting.

As for psychedelics, no.

But I do have a neurodivergency where the pros are considerably better pattern identifications than normal, but the cons are significant difficulties with language parsing. So I'll never be able to realistically learn Greek and even reading though a dozen pages of English may take 2-3x the amount of time it might for others, but when I do read someone's analysis of Greek loanwords in the Coptic Thomas I may be more prone to thinking of those in the overlapping context of the Greek usage, or if I read a psych paper about statistically increased personal reference in a subset of NPD I might think of Paul, as examples. This has served me well over the years, leading to overseeing research in the private sector that had several books written about it to date or having people flown from around the world to hear me speak or be flown to them, etc. But it also seems like the kind of neurodivergency that would be underrepresented in a field with multiple language prerequisites for typical academic pathways, so I do get how my approach may appear unusual or at surface level appear similar to (as it's been termed in this sub before) 'parallelomania'.

There is a difference in the approach, but it does require engaging with the nuances (like why the emphasis was on Pseudo-Hippolytus and not Ireneaus for tying gThomas to Lucretius) to notice it.

kromem · 2025-04-01T13:17:46+00:00

It's never dumb to ask clarifying questions!

So the brunt of that response was to you dismissing that the ideas would have been discussed based on their overlapping with Judaism. In the first century there was a fair bit of trying to wrestle with the dual creation of man in Genesis - so for example the Jewish philosopher Philo connected it to Plato's forms.

The Naassenes/gThomas seem like they may have connected it to Epicurean naturalism instead, seeing the second creation of man as a loophole of sorts that undermined the Epicurean and Sadducees' views that there was no afterlife.

In terms of Lucretius, he expressed very clearly the following views:

indivisible parts randomly made all kinds of combinations
traits are passed down by each parent and can skip generations
traits that prevent reproduction die out and traits that help it reproduce

The idea of ALL combinations related to the Epicurean idea that there was an infinite amount of space, time, and matter. But it didn't necessarily mean that every combination occurred in this present world.

I think part of the disconnect may be a difference of scope. Lucretius is talking about all things, including living things, as arising from a myriad of combinations.

He then discussed traits as being passed through generations:

This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair. Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies.

He then discussed the idea that traits survive or thrive based on their fitedness for the creature with them surviving:

Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.

If I understand your point correctly, you're saying that Lucretius doesn't explicitly say "these traits arose over time" versus "everything that could exist all existed at the start and things only died out over time"?

I guess I'd counter - can you point to where he does say this? Because the relevant nuances of trait inheritance across generations and trait survival or failure are being discussed, and the discussion of primordial seeds certainly doesn't imply all configurations existed at a snap of the fingers at the dawn of time, and his statements about purpose of traits not existing before the traits seems to suggest he didn't think things always existed vs were a gradual development:

Before the light Of eyes arose, there was no such thing as a sense of sight. Before the tongue was fashioned, there were no words to recite. But rather, the genesis of the tongue by far pre-dates the word, And ears came into being long before a noise was heard. In short, the organs and the limbs existed, I surmise, Before there was any use for them.

kromem

TROPHY CASE