Vocesanticae

Introduction

Hi! I'm Mark G. Bilby. You can find my professional profiles on ORCID (which contains an identity-confirming link back to this user page), Github, Google Scholar, Humanities Commons, Academia.edu, ResearchGate.net, ResearcherID, Scopus, Open Science Framework, Figshare, LinkedIn, ISNI, and VIAF.

Education

• PhD in Religious Studies (Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity) from the University of Virginia (2012)
• MSLIS (Library & Information Science) from Drexel University (2015)
• MA (2002) and MDiv (2000) degrees from Nazarene Theological Seminary
• additional language coursework at the University of Notre Dame, Calvin Theological Seminary, and University of Missouri--Kansas City

Teaching/Faculty Positions

I've taught at numerous universities, including Cal State Fullerton, Claremont School of Theology, Azusa Pacific University, Point Loma Nazarene University, Iowa State University, and Saint Paul School of Theology. Before that, I was a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Virginia. Faculty service included participating in a wide range of academic senate committees, statewide CSU library committees, and hiring committees. Among notable work and service accomplishments was proposing, championing, and co-authoring two successful resolutions for the Statewide Academic Senate of the California State University system, one advocating a Green Open Access policy (AS-3376-19/FA) and another advocating ORCID identifiers and integrations (AS-3412-20/FA).

Academic Specializations

• Marcion's Gospel (Lk1) and the Gospel of Luke (Lk2), their versions, manuscripts, and receptions/interpretations throughout the centuries
• Qn (the first gospel as scientifically proven and reconstructed) vs. Q (the traditional speculative reconstruction of the lost sayings source)
• Saint Dismas aka the Good Thief, the formation of his cult, and his apocrypha in Greek, Latin, and Coptic
• early Christian apocrypha and early Christian martyr accounts
• Pliny the Younger, especially as related to the Gospel of Luke and Acts, and the development of earliest Christianity
• Good Friday sermons, especially by orthodox church leaders such as Chrysostom, Severian of Gabala, and Proclus of Constantinople
• Myth Criticism (aka Mimesis Criticism) of the canonical Gospels and Acts, especially Iphigenia and Orestes myths
• Jacobus Arminius and the Wesleyan-Arminian movement
• the open access / open source / open data / open science movement
• Homeric Greek up to Byzantine Greek and Classical Latin up to Modern Latin: translation, linguistics, philology, and paleography
• Computational Linguistics, Historical Corpus Linguistics, and Data Science, especially related to the formation of the earliest gospels

Digital Humanities and Publishing Administration

Together with Tony Burke and Bradley Rice, I co-founded the e-Clavis comprehensive bibliography of Christian apocrypha, hosted by the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature. I have advised on and/or managed many other Digital Humanities projects, including major initiatives related to digitization, metadata curation, linked open data, translation, and manuscript collation. In various professional positions, I have helped to manage the production of books and journals, including the journals Fides et Historia, the Californian Journal of Health Promotion, and the Journal of Consent-Based Performance.

New Scientific Hypotheses and Method to Recover Qn (the First Gospel) and Solve the Synoptic Problem

Through the Journal of Open Humanities Data and Harvard Dataverse, I published the first ever born-digital, peer-reviewed, normalized datasets of all previous Greek reconstructions of the Gospel of Marcion as well as Marcion's Apostolos, or collection of the letters of the Apostle Paul. These publications are part of a larger research project, for which I pioneered a new academic open science iterative book format, the LODLIB (Linked Open Data Living Informational Book), a format I have used to propose and develop a new scientific solution to the Synoptic Problem and the restoration of the lost Q gospel.

The online, open access book that elaborates these proofs is entitled, The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem based on Marcion's Early Luke. This work makes robust use of Data Science and Computational Linguistics methods to prove five hypotheses, which I first publicly archived and released in July 2020.

1. The vast majority of attested materials in GMcn consistently reflects a simple two source program, drawing on Early Mark (Mk1) and Qn, modestly editing and paraphrasing them, and rotating back and forth between them with minimal redactional stitching
2. When Luke has parallels with Matthew and/or Gos. Thomas and those parallels are explicitly corroborated by GMcn, then this confirms their existence in Qn
3. When GMcn attests to the presence of Qn passages and verses in Luke, the order of these materials is preferable to the ordering of Qn materials in Matthew
4. When Matthew has a parallel with Luke that is not present in GMcn, this is not Qn, and when it is unattested for GMcn, it is probably not Qn
5. When GMcn has a parallel in Luke that is not in Matthew or Mark, then these are additions to Qn

Featured Publication

The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem based on Marcion's Early Luke. LODLIB v4.09. 2020-07/2024-11. ISBN 9798987768808 (for original edition). Base DOI 10.5281/zenodo.3927056 (for all editions).