Here’s a summary of a few passion project research holes I went down over the past few years (citations available):
- It’s very likely that the Gospel of Thomas was related to the writings of Lucretius, there’s a high chance the historical Jesus was talking about indivisible parts of matter (atomism) and a decent chance he was talking about natural selection, both ideas extensively found in Lucretius in some cases with near identical language to what’s both canonical and apocryphal
- Nefertiti (“beautiful woman who arrived”) and the story of Helen of Troy have some remarkable overlaps, particularly given Herodotus’s account of Helen ending up in Egypt the whole time - and the two datable parts of Herodotus’s version both line up with the 18th dynasty, which was parallel to the Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia
- Ramses II was described as appearing to be a Lybian Berber in his forensic examination, and had around 50 sons, which makes the ancient claims the story of Danaus (the Lybian ruler who was brother to a Pharoh with 50 sons) occurred in the 19th dynasty a bit more intriguing
- There may have been some truth to a Moses/Mopsus narrative at the tail end of the 19th dynasty, but it would have related to the twelve groups of tribes of Anatolian peoples captured by Ramses II at Kadesh and some of their later actions as part of the confederation referred to as “the sea peoples” - this lines up more closely with Greek and Egyptian accounts of the Exodus tale as multiethnic or including Greek ancestors too. Some of those sea peoples were later forcibly relocated to the Southern Levant where there was cohabitation near the local Israelites who later on have stories about these events, talk about Dan “staying on their ships” or trading with Tyre alongside the Greeks, and recent archeology has found Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan or the only apiary in the “land of milk and honey” importing Anatolian bees in Tel Rehov, which starts to cast a very different picture of some old stories
What’s on your research agenda now? Like, what is an unanswered question (with respect to your own knowledge) that you’re curious about?
Most of my attention has shifted over to following emerging research on large language models. Right now my key focus there is relating to alignment strategies. I’ve had a strong suspicion since GPT-4 released that the way in which the most recent models are being fine tuned throws away a lot of valuable skills outside what we measure for, and that instead an alignment strategy more similar to the interplay between intrusive thoughts and the prefrontal cortex would achieve more consistent alignment results without sacrificing capabilities. There’s been a few papers over the last year (and even just the last few weeks) that are starting to support similar findings.
In terms of history stuff, there’s still a few odd details I might circle back to, but it mostly feels like I hit diminishing returns unless we see significant new discoveries in materials (which I actually hope we will as LLMs become capable enough to translate into English the extensive bodies of untranslated but discovered works like the Oxy papyri).
One is to follow up on a line of inquiry I’d find relating to grammatical fingerprinting of Paul’s epistles. There was a 2017 psych study that found vulnerable narcissists have a greater degree of personal reference in their writing, and he’s always struck me a bit of that type (“I’m the least of the apostles” fluctuating with “I’m not less than the greatest of the apostles”). When I analyzed the letters in English, there’s significantly more personal reference in the undisputed Pauline letters than non-Pauline Epistles. But the really interesting part is the disputed letters. Only one falls within the range of the undisputed letters in its frequency of personal reference, and it’s one that most scholars have historically thought was forged (2 Timothy). At some point I’ll come back around to doing a similar analysis on the original Greek.
Another recent thread I may look more into would be the Mediterranean parallels for terms translating as “Great Lady” in the LBA and early Iron Age. There’s some weird nuances to a term like that being applied in the Bible to various women, particularly alleged around women connected to the Egyptian pharoh’s household - but when I cross referenced Egyptian records around the relevant time I only see a similar translated term being applied to a Hittite queen who was co-signing the world’s first extant treaty. So now I’m wondering if either (a) the association with Egypt in the OT was an anachronistic rationalization for a foreign concept that was actually originating from Anatolia (like the bees and potentially the tribe of Dan) or (b) if it really did relate to Egypt but because of one or more queens coming from Anatolia marrying into the Pharoh’s household. If the latter, it might help narrow down specifically which dynasties a few alleged events were supposed to have been occurring.
