An Authorship Study on the Letters of Saint Paul.
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2018-07-29
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The Letters of Paul are an important part of the New Testament canon, but for several of them, the authorship is disputed. In this study, I applied authorship attribution techniques to the Letters of St. Paul. Samples were taken from the letters commonly accepted as genuinely Pauline, the disputed letters (Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians), and several non-Pauline letters from the New Testament. Features were divided into general text measurements, syntactic features, vocabulary features and character n-grams. All types of features did relatively well at
distinguishing between Pauline and non-Pauline samples.
Although the results are not unambiguous, the careful conclusion is that Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians are probably not written by Paul. 2 Thessalonians significantly deviated from the Pauline letters in overall measures, whereas Ephesians and Colossians deviated in syntactic and vocabulary features.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren