Best works on the inauthenticity of the pastoral epistles?

Biblical Greek morphology and syntax, aspect, linguistics, discourse analysis, and related topics
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Matthew Longhorn
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Best works on the inauthenticity of the pastoral epistles?

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

I am planning to start reading Jermo van Nes' book "Pauline Language and the Pastoral Epistles - A Study of Linguistic Variation in the Corpus Paulinum"
https://brill.com/display/title/36019
In Pauline Language and the Pastoral Epistles Jermo van Nes questions the common assumption in New Testament scholarship that language variation is necessarily due to author variation. By using the so-called Pastoral Epistles (PE) as a test-case, Van Nes demonstrates by means of statistical linguistics that only one out of five of their major lexical and syntactic peculiarities differs significantly from other Pauline writings. Most of the PE’s linguistic peculiarities are shown to differ considerably in the Corpus Paulinum, but modern studies in classics and linguistics suggest that factors other than author variation account equally if not better for this variation. Since all of these explanatory factors are compatible with current authorship hypotheses of the PE, Van Nes suggests to no longer use language as a criterion in debates about their authenticity.
So far the reviews that I have access to on this book all seem fairly positive, but I am sure that there must be some negative ones out there.

For various reasons I want to start ensuring I read works with a counter view to this as well but am not sure where to start. What are people's thoughts on the best resources arguing that the Pastoral Epistles are not written by Paul based on linguistic grounds?

I came across this recent phd thesis on the pastorals by James Fickensher "A RANK-BASED ANALYSIS OF WORD ORDER AND CODIFICATION IN THE GREEK
OF THE PASTORAL EPISTLES" - figured people may be interested. https://scholar.csl.edu/cgi/viewcontent ... ontext=phd
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Best works on the inauthenticity of the pastoral epistles?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Matthew Longhorn wrote: December 31st, 2022, 10:17 am What are people's thoughts on the best resources arguing that the Pastoral Epistles are not written by Paul based on linguistic grounds?
I am a very empirical kind of guy. And so far, I have found arguments for authorship based on linguistics to be unconvincing. Intuitively, it feels like one book is written by someone else based on the Greek, but what I haven't seen is a clear demonstration that a proposed method actually works with real human writers.

I assume Dr. Seuss wrote in a different style and with a different vocabulary when he wrote essays in college or when he wrote love letters to his wife. We all change our style when writing to different audiences and on different subjects. The Gospel of Luke demonstrates this quite clearly. And Paul would probably have been writing together with a scribe, who would have his own writing style. Some of Paul's letters indicate that he is with others as he writes, very likely discussing what to write and bringing their thoughts and language into the mix.

So this is complicated stuff. How do I know if I'm looking at two different authors versus a single author with a variety of styles? This paper describes a benchmark that can be used to test a method:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.06869v2.pdf

This link provides a broader set of academic papers on authorship verification that provide code and data:

https://paperswithcode.com/task/authorship-verification

On today's Internet, identifying authorship is pretty important to social media providers and to intelligence agencies, so there's a lot of work on it. But biblical researchers sometimes seem to assert a greater degree of confidence than modern researchers would using modern techniques and benchmarks. And some of them seem to be living in a silo, separated from other people working on authorship.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Matthew Longhorn
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Re: Best works on the inauthenticity of the pastoral epistles?

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

Jonathan Robie wrote: December 31st, 2022, 3:19 pm I assume Dr. Seuss wrote in a different style and with a different vocabulary when he wrote essays in college or when he wrote love letters to his wife. We all change our style when writing to different audiences and on different subjects


So this is complicated stuff. How do I know if I'm looking at two different authors versus a single author with a variety of styles?
Agreed on the above, and it has always been my default position. I guess I am just wanting to expose myself to arguments that are different from my previous convictions; now I am pretty much agnostic on the issue finally acknowledging my ignorance, but curious as to the implications.

Thanks for those links - I will have a look
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