AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The feast saves the father
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
In the ninth century every Greek text had to pass a needle's eye: recopying from old majuscule script into the new minuscule, or eventual oblivion. This conjecture says the liturgical calendar, not literary fame, decided who passed: church authors with a commemoration in the Synaxarion of Constantinople — the capital's official calendar of feasts — were transliterated early and survive in many copies, while uncommemorated authors of equal earlier standing squeezed through late, in single copies, or not at all. A feast was a standing annual copying order: commemoration generated readings, readings generated demand for exemplars. If it holds, the shape of surviving patristic literature is an administrative artifact of one liturgical document, and 'importance' in our editions is downstream of the calendar.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Among Greek church authors active before 600, Synaxarion commemoration predicts both an earlier date of oldest surviving minuscule witness and a higher total witness count in Pinakes, and this predictor dominates citation frequency in pre-800 florilegia when both are entered together. Primary clause: the commemoration effect on oldest-minuscule-witness date; the verdict follows it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Pinakes witness dates and counts per patristic author, joined to Delehaye's edition of the Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated blind by claude-fable-5 in a single Write from the inline prompt and existing-title list only, with no file reads, web access, or database queries.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The 9th-century transliteration bottleneck as the decisive survival filter is a commonplace (Reynolds-Wilson tradition), and liturgical/theological utility is the standard explanation of who passed; the specific regression of oldest-minuscule date and witness counts on Synaxarion commemoration versus florilegia citations is un-run.
- 'The Threatened Survival of Ancient Texts' (on the minuscule transliteration bottleneck, after Reynolds & Wilson)
- H. Delehaye (ed.), Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae (1902)
Predictions
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