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

Counting Paulgoes 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 Pauldebunks 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.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 T?bingen 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 Paulexposes the ideologlã