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my sense as someone who reads about this stuff for fun and not professionally is that it's more the former, precisely because the evidence on this stuff is so thin and there just isn't a set of methdological tools that lets us unpeel the gospels in the way that people want to be able to do here

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and i think dale allison argues for continuity with paul, insofar as saying jesus had a renunciatory ascetic approach to sexuality? but the evidence in thin here and idk if his work is more "yeah this is plausible" or "yeah this is where the field as a whole is at"

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i think william loader did a survey on sexuality in ancient judaism and early christianity but that deals with like the NT as a text more than the historical jesus himself

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but contrariwise it's clear there are dense layers of tradition and elaboration accreted onto the basic gospel accounts, many of which alter or renegotiate jesus's teachings

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cf.: E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus Theissen and Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium none of these are fringe scholars operating on the margins

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and we definitely can't point to anything nearly as precise as a specific sexual ethic (though some argument has been made that the prohibition of divorce is clear and unanimous enough that it probably goes back to Jesus; i'm not sure how much consensus there is on this one though)

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like concern for the poor and love for enemies; but getting much more specific than this is really hard!

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including divine intervention, the restoration of the kingdom of israel, and stuff that was in line with the broader apocalyptic milieu. some scholars have made an argument for certain ethical themes

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beyond that there *are* generalities that are recoverable: his perspective was thoroughly jewish, and came out of the milieu of second temple judaism; the kingdom of god was his central theme (though the significance of this theme is very uncertain), and he predicted the end times were imminent

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the scholarly consensus does agree on certain facts about jesus: his birth in nazareth (bethlehem is a later tradition), his baptism by john, he had disciples and taught in galilee, and did something at the temple that got him in trouble with the authorities and was crucified

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given that the jesus myth theory explicitly states jesus was not a historical person, "jesus was a historical person" cannot, almost by definition, be "a version of" the jesus myth

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...no, it isn't? the jesus myth is a fringe theory, while this is pretty close to the scholarly consensus?

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and we do know the gospel authors would have been drawing on traditions that had been substantially influenced by paul, and thus trying to separate out a definitive pre-paul "original" layer from the gospel texts is fraught to say the least

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(in a narrow logical sense we can't "prove" this or that passage is authentic or inauthentic, but in that narrow sense there is almost nothing we can prove about anything in history)

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the more careful way to phrase it is that we cannot point to any passage in the gospels and say "this is probably or likely original to the teachings of jesus," and for most passages in the gospel we have no reason to particularly weight them as authentic

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Memory, Tradition, and Text, ed. Kirk and Thatcher Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity, ed. Galinsky Memory and the Jesus Tradition by Kirk

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Why Christians CAN’T follow Jesus

ok just gonna borrow from this dan mcclellan video where he's responding to much stronger and sillier apologetic claims, but covers basically the same ground www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAPg...

youtube.com

YouTube video by Dan McClellan

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give me a few minutes and i'll grab some more sources for you

who after all was writing decades earlier, before the destruction of the temple and the catastrophic roman-jewish wars

so while we can say that there are probably elements of the gospel that do go back to the historical jesus, it becomes basically impossible to point to any passage and say "this is original or largely original," or that the gospel authors understood it in the way that jesus did--or even paul

and that between the destruction of the second temple, the shift in the early jesus movement from an apocalyptic messianic denomination within judaism into a more eclectic group, and even just the simple fact of jesus' execution radically altered the circumstances of the movement

but more recent scholarship on the social transmission of traditions and texts in oral cultures has basically destroyed a lot of these arguments; it's clear both that primarily oral traditions do in fact heavily renegotiate themselves based on community circumstances

and scholars like harald riesenfeld and kenneth bailey argued that either jesus taught in a rabbinic-like tradition where his followers memorized his message, or that there was a kind of controlled informal transmission of his message that meant the gospels might have recorded it pretty faithfully

tanadrin @tanadrin.bsky.social · 19h

so the paleographic, historical, and literary evidence puts the composition of the canonical gospels somewhere in the 70-110 CE range (with one or two very narrow outliers who argue for much earlier or later dates for Mark or Luke-Acts)

tanadrin @tanadrin.bsky.social · 20h

the causal arrow can't run gospels -> paul because the gospels didn't exist when paul was alive

tanadrin @tanadrin.bsky.social · 20h

the gospels were written after the Pauline epistles, and they almost certainly don't represent jesus's original, unaltered teachings in any form.

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tanadrin @tanadrin.bsky.social · 22h

and just extraordinarily misogynistic (the greeks especially)

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tanadrin @tanadrin.bsky.social · 22h

i mean. sexuality is part of society and all societies have social norms. but there are absolutely societies with less thoroughly patriarchal or much less sexually restrictive norms. the ancient mediterranean was very much on the restrictive end of the spectrum of historically attested societies

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tanadrin @tanadrin.bsky.social · 23h

catholic sex and gender weirdness is definitely way more downstream of platonism than it is the hebrew bible

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tanadrin @tanadrin.bsky.social · 23h

yeah and a lot of christian hesitancy about sex comes from hellenistic philosophical ideas about the corrupt material world. paul's line is you really shouldn't ever have sex at all, but if you *have* to, ugh, fine, but only when married and don't have fun

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or i mean you could just pass a law saying all models have to be open weight, but that would be kind of a weird half-measure IMO

which is a fine proposal--by all means, nationalize anthropic and openAI if you want--but we should be clear here about what the legal/policy issue at stake is; it's not IP law, it's means-of-LLM-production (and means-of-serving-LLMs-to-consumers)

but if i hold a copy of a large quantity of data that's in the public domain, i am not required to give you access to it just because it is in the public domain (for example). so i think what the quote post *actually* means is they want some kind of public ownership of frontier labs

i mean, in the narrow sense of IP rights as the quoted post phrases it, models already *are* public domain, and their output is as well. like AIUI you cannot copyright an LLM. the barriers here aren't IP protections in any substantive sense

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(lack of IP protections is also why distillation attacks aren't illegal! nor should they be IMO)

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like to the extent you want to benefit from the information commons condensed into a big model, any big open-weight model *is* that, in principle. you can run those yourself (if you have access to the hardware necessary)

mostly the value add for big models isn't in the pretraining anyway (the thing that uses data scraped from every available source, and which doesn't differ much at this point between labs AFAICT), it's in the reinforcement learning that goes in after the pretraining is done

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(and there is a separate policy issue of whether we would want to make frontier models freely available to all and sundry to abliterate and then use for cybercrime or generating CSAM)

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in the sense that they don't make the weights public, frontier models are not generally open *access* ("lacks intellectual property protections" is not the same as "is required to furnish you a copy of what's sitting on their servers")

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

you know that the products of LLMs already are not copyrightable, right? nor are LLMs themselves. like the thing that openAI and Anthropic are selling isn't access to an IP, it's hosting and serving the model

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Reposted by tanadrin

i have some what i would call speculative beliefs on what consciousness is, which i do not expect anyone else to take seriously and barely take seriously myself, but sort of take a Jain view of the first-order issue: that one should never make suffering the object of one's actions.

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and if you're just an angry enough person to yell and cuss at alexa, people are going to side-eye you pretty hard! same if you slam your car door and kick it and yell. like. the problem is not that people are worried about your car's feelings, the problem is that you come off aggressive as hell

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(tangent here, but this was why the angst over violent video games always struck me as overblown: the draw of Doom wasn't "letting out your simmering rage at the world at an acceptable target," it was "haha pixels go boom;" the emotional context was not anger/violence, it was playing a fun game)

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