Gaming Paul
Benjamin L. White · 2025
Abstract This chapter identifies how best practices in the wider field of computational stylistics should apply to the Pauline authorship problem. It discusses recent developments in forensic stylometry and describes the results of a set of novel stylometric authorship tests on the Pauline Epistles. The chapter shows, based on these tests, that there is little reason to think that listed co-authors in the Pauline Epistles have affected their Pauline style, or that the scribal transmission of the Pauline Epistles has obscured our ability to make reasonable inferences about authorship from authorship attribution tests. A final set of clustering tests of thirty-three early Christian epistles provide results that can be reasonably interpreted in a number of different ways, depending on the prior assumptions of the interpreter. The chapter concludes that what “counts” for Paul depends on tradition, not mathematics. One does not find a Cartesian foundation in the Paul-as-math-problem approach.