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Counting Paul goes inside the field of computational stylistics and asks whether its methods can solve, as some have claimed, one of the most vexed questions in Biblical Studies: Who wrote the Pauline Epistles? As a first-of-its-kind meta-analysis of the application of forensic stylometry to the Pauline authorship question,
Counting Paul debunks much of what has passed as a Cartesian foundation for separating out the historical Paul from the canonical Paul and shows that there is no mathematical solution to this basic humanities question. It reorients the question within the milieu of Paul's early reception in Christianity.
List of contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1: Studying Paul
- 2: Counting Paul
- 3: Computing Paul
- 4: Gaming Paul
- 5: Theorizing Paul
- Appendix A: 100 Most Frequent Words in Romans, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, Hebrews, 1 Peter, 1 John, James, 1 Clement, Barnabas, and Ignatius' Ephesians
- Appendix B: 50 Most Frequent Character 4-grams in Romans, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, Hebrews, 1 Peter, 1 John, James, 1 Clement, Barnabas, and Ignatius' Ephesians
- Appendix C: Weighting Data for Clustering Tests of 50-100 MFW (Distance: Delta) of Romans, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, Hebrews, 1 Peter, 1 John, James, 1 Clement, Barnabas, and Ignatius' Ephesians
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Benjamin L. White is Associate Professor of Religion, Department of Philosophy and Religion at Clemson University. His first book,
Remembering Paul (2014, OUP), explored how Paul becomes an object of knowledge. His articles have appeared in the
Journal for the Study of the New Testament, the
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and
Vigiliae christianae. He co-chairs the Historical Paul section of the Society of Biblical Literature and serves on the editorial board of the
Journal of Theological Studies.
Summary
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.
