376 research outputs found
Cleansing the Common: Narrative-Intertextual Study of Mark 7:1-23
The conflict story of Mark 7:1ā23 between Jesus and the religious leaders over the issue of defilement is the meeting point of a variety of disciplines: Purity studies, Jewish studies, exegetical studies, Historical Jesus studies, and studies on Jesus and the law. The crux of the passage, the meaning of the parable in v. 15 and the ensuing ācleansingā in v. 19, has been interpreted very differently. Scholars doing exegetical studies and studies on the relationship between Jesus and the law have maintained that the Gospel writer correctly reflects in 7:19 the meaning of Jesusā parable (7:15), abrogating the clean/unclean categories of Lev 11. Scholars doing purity, Jewish, and recent Historical Jesus studies have generally argued that Jesus could not have abrogated these food laws in the social and religious setting of his day. The controversial remark in a narrative aside must be Markās comment on Jesusā saying to accommodate the Christian community in the later part of the first century.
Chapter 1 introduces the narrative-intertextual methodology used in the subsequent chapters. This methodology allows a careful examination of the literary material in Markās Gospel in the first part of the dissertation and a careful examination of purity issues arising out of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Second Temple period in the later part.
The narrative analysis in chapters 2ā3 reveals that Mark uses space, time, props, movement, prefixes, verb tenses, and technical terminology meticulously and astutely to develop the themes in the pericope and build a cohesive literary unit. The central theme of the entire pericope is ātouch defilement,ā which is first introduced in the observation that the disciples eat with defiled (unwashed) hands. It is augmented with a conflict over authority.
Chapter 4 examines the interrelationship of purity terms in biblical literature of the later Second Temple period. In the major reference works predating the 1970s, the purity terms ĪŗĪæĪ¹Ī½ĻĻ (ādefiledā), į¼ĪŗĪ¬ĪøĪ±ĻĻĪæĻ (āuncleanā), and Ī²ĪĪ²Ī·Ī»ĪæĻ (āprofaneā) were more or less used interchangeably. Since the 1970s though, studies examining the topic of purity have differentiated these terms. An assessment of 1 Macc 1:47, 62; Mark 7:1ā23; Acts 10ā11; and the parallel passages of Acts 21:28 and 24:6 leads to the conclusion that ĪŗĪæĪ¹Ī½ĻĻ/ĪŗĪæĪ¹Ī½ĻĻ is a term unique to the Second Temple period and distinct from other purity terminology. It is best defined as an intermediary defilement that a clean person/object acquires by coming in contact with an unclean person/object. Since ĪŗĪæĪ¹Ī½ĻĻ impurity is unknown in the Hebrew Scriptures, Mark is correct in attributing it to the ātradition of the elders.ā
Scholarship has generally connected allusions in Mark 7:1ā23 to the clean/unclean animals of Lev 11. Chapter 5 assesses the intertextual allusions based on literary, thematic, and logical parallels. In each category Mark indeed refers to Lev 11, but not to the section on clean/unclean animals (Lev 11:1ā23, 41ā43). Instead, the allusions always point to the section on touch contamination by a carcass (Lev 11:24ā 40) or the section containing holiness language (Lev 11:44ā45). Mark underlines the topic of touch defilement and ethical purity by means of these allusions to Lev 11.
A concluding chapter summarizes the findings. In Mark 7:1ā23 neither Mark nor Jesus abrogates the clean/unclean distinction of Leviticus. Instead, Mark in v. 19 correctly summarizes Jesusā position that new ātraditions,ā established during the Second Temple period, overextended Godās requirements and are hence invalid. In the larger context (Mark 6ā8 and particularly Mark 7:24ā30), ĪŗĪæĪ¹Ī½ĻĻ defilement from Gentiles is therefore an invalid expansion of Godās law and, instead, mission to all people is a divine imperative (Gen 12:1ā3; Mark 7:24ā30; Acts 10ā11).
Mark 7:1ā23 is shown to be a coherent whole illustrated in four steps. The narrative data demonstrate the unity of the pericope. Jesusā support of the law against Second Temple period additions is found in both vv. 1ā13 and 14ā23. The passageās marked parallelism to the defilement and holiness theology of Lev 11 exhibits the Evangelistās sensitivity to purity issues. And the congruence of the passageās teaching with the trajectory of mission in Acts 10 demonstrates the heuristic power of this explanation of Mark 7
Matrix-free GPU implementation of a preconditioned conjugate gradient solver for anisotropic elliptic PDEs
Many problems in geophysical and atmospheric modelling require the fast
solution of elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) in "flat" three
dimensional geometries. In particular, an anisotropic elliptic PDE for the
pressure correction has to be solved at every time step in the dynamical core
of many numerical weather prediction models, and equations of a very similar
structure arise in global ocean models, subsurface flow simulations and gas and
oil reservoir modelling. The elliptic solve is often the bottleneck of the
forecast, and an algorithmically optimal method has to be used and implemented
efficiently. Graphics Processing Units have been shown to be highly efficient
for a wide range of applications in scientific computing, and recently
iterative solvers have been parallelised on these architectures. We describe
the GPU implementation and optimisation of a Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient
(PCG) algorithm for the solution of a three dimensional anisotropic elliptic
PDE for the pressure correction in NWP. Our implementation exploits the strong
vertical anisotropy of the elliptic operator in the construction of a suitable
preconditioner. As the algorithm is memory bound, performance can be improved
significantly by reducing the amount of global memory access. We achieve this
by using a matrix-free implementation which does not require explicit storage
of the matrix and instead recalculates the local stencil. Global memory access
can also be reduced by rewriting the algorithm using loop fusion and we show
that this further reduces the runtime on the GPU. We demonstrate the
performance of our matrix-free GPU code by comparing it to a sequential CPU
implementation and to a matrix-explicit GPU code which uses existing libraries.
The absolute performance of the algorithm for different problem sizes is
quantified in terms of floating point throughput and global memory bandwidth.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure
Deep surrogate accelerated delayed-acceptance HMC for Bayesian inference of spatio-temporal heat fluxes in rotating disc systems
We study the Bayesian inverse problem of inferring the Biot number, a
spatio-temporal heat-flux parameter in a PDE model. This is an ill-posed
problem where standard optimisation yields unphysical inferences. We introduce
a training scheme that uses temperature data to adaptively train a
neural-network surrogate to simulate the parametric forward model. This
approach approximates forward and inverse solution together, by simultaneously
identifying an approximate posterior distribution over the Biot number, and
weighting the forward training loss according to this approximation. Utilising
random Chebyshev series, we outline how to approximate an arbitrary Gaussian
process prior, and using the surrogate we apply Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC)
to efficiently sample from the corresponding posterior distribution. We derive
convergence of the surrogate posterior to the true posterior distribution in
the Hellinger metric as our adaptive loss function approaches zero.
Furthermore, we describe how this surrogate-accelerated HMC approach can be
combined with a traditional PDE solver in a delayed-acceptance scheme to
a-priori control the posterior accuracy, thus overcoming a major limitation of
deep learning-based surrogate approaches, which do not achieve guaranteed
accuracy a-priori due to their non-convex training. Biot number calculations
are involved turbo-machinery design, which is safety critical and highly
regulated, therefore it is important that our results have such mathematical
guarantees. Our approach achieves fast mixing in high-dimensional parameter
spaces, whilst retaining the convergence guarantees of a traditional PDE
solver, and without the burden of evaluating this solver for proposals that are
likely to be rejected. Numerical results compare the accuracy and efficiency of
the adaptive and general training regimes, as well as various Markov chain
Monte Carlo proposals strategies
Deep surrogate accelerated delayed-acceptance HMC for Bayesian inference of spatio-temporal heat fluxes in rotating disc systems
We study the Bayesian inverse problem of inferring the Biot number, a
spatio-temporal heat-flux parameter in a PDE model. This is an ill-posed
problem where standard optimisation yields unphysical inferences. We introduce
a training scheme that uses temperature data to adaptively train a
neural-network surrogate to simulate the parametric forward model. This
approach approximates forward and inverse solution together, by simultaneously
identifying an approximate posterior distribution over the Biot number, and
weighting the forward training loss according to this approximation. Utilising
random Chebyshev series, we outline how to approximate an arbitrary Gaussian
process prior, and using the surrogate we apply Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC)
to efficiently sample from the corresponding posterior distribution. We derive
convergence of the surrogate posterior to the true posterior distribution in
the Hellinger metric as our adaptive loss function approaches zero.
Furthermore, we describe how this surrogate-accelerated HMC approach can be
combined with a traditional PDE solver in a delayed-acceptance scheme to
a-priori control the posterior accuracy, thus overcoming a major limitation of
deep learning-based surrogate approaches, which do not achieve guaranteed
accuracy a-priori due to their non-convex training. Biot number calculations
are involved turbo-machinery design, which is safety critical and highly
regulated, therefore it is important that our results have such mathematical
guarantees. Our approach achieves fast mixing in high-dimensional parameter
spaces, whilst retaining the convergence guarantees of a traditional PDE
solver, and without the burden of evaluating this solver for proposals that are
likely to be rejected. Numerical results compare the accuracy and efficiency of
the adaptive and general training regimes, as well as various Markov chain
Monte Carlo proposals strategies
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