Counting Paul: Scientificity, Fuzzy Math, and Ideology in Pauline Studies

FAIN: FT-259487-18

Benjamin Lee White
Clemson University (Clemson, SC 29634-0001)

Research and preparation of two scholarly articles on the forensic stylometry and authorship of the Epistles of Saint Paul.

This project explores the limitations of forensic stylometry – the detection of an author’s literary fingerprint in the service of exposing forgery. The development of tests, tools, and protocols within computational stylistics has increased confidence in conclusions about authorship, yet tests on the Pauline Epistles in the New Testament over the past 50 years have resulted in divergent findings about which of the 13 texts are authentic. This project seeks to discern why some ancient corpora like the Pauline Epistles have been resistant to consistent authorial categorization. The results will not only help scholars of Christian origins to reassess the relative value of forensic stylometry for their work, but will also serve as a caution for scholars of antiquity more generally who work with short texts in small corpora. Moreover, the project will help forensic stylometrists identify the limitations of their tools in relation to some corpora of great historical interest.

Associated Products

Counting Paul: Scientificity, Fuzzy Math, and Ideology in Pauline Studies (Book)
Title: Counting Paul: Scientificity, Fuzzy Math, and Ideology in Pauline Studies
Author: Benjamin L. White
Abstract: Who wrote the Pauline Epistles? For nearly 1,700 years the answer seemed fairly straightforward. The New Testament canon set the boundary at thirteen (or fourteen, including Hebrews) Pauline Epistles, alongside an uncontroversial biographical framework within which to imagine them in Acts. In the early nineteenth century the identification of the historical Paul with the canonical Paul was severed when theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur of the University of Tübingen laid the groundwork for the fundamental historiographical moves that still orient Pauline Studies as a critical discipline by both delimiting the number of authentic Pauline Epistles and highlighting the tendentious character of Acts' portrayal of Paul. Given the highly uncertain and subjective nature of so much of the argumentation over the authenticity of the Pauline Epistles as it developed in the nineteenth century, the analysis of authorial style took on increasing weight as a way out of so many special decisions. The linguistic features of texts were counted, averaged, and compared. In measuring one text against another, the Pauline stylome emerged as the incontrovertible standard for uncovering canonical forgeries in the Apostle's name. Tracing the long history of the computational approach to the Pauline authorship problem, Counting Paul exposes the ideological foundations and questionable science of much of the work and argues that Pauline biography ought not be written from fewer sources than what the New Testament has given us, but rather more. It advocates for a more expansive vision of what might count as Pauline by reorienting our focus away from internal criteria, like appeals to style, and toward external criteria, like the reception of Paul in the generations after his death.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/counting-paul-9780197802243?lang=en&cc=us#
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780197802243
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---