Disentangling Authorship and Genre in the Greek New Testament: History, Method and Praxis

Abstract

This is a work that explores linguistic style within the Greek New Testament and the extent to which its presumed causes (e.g. differences in authorship, genre, topic, subject matter, and the like) can be “disentangled.” Scarcely anyone who has perused the long history of authorship debates in the New Testament can mistake the profound implications such a “disentangling” would bring. Two motivations exist to revisit this issue: compelling recent findings in computational stylistics, and the sheer theological implications such a study may bring. Concerning the former motivation, earlier generations of scholars assigned, de facto, virtually any significant stylistic variation to authorship alone. The last thirty years of research outside NT studies, however, has demonstrated that more frequently than not, more of the total summed stylistic variation in mixed genre corpora is due to genre rather than authorship. What, indeed, would be the implications if those findings proved true of the GNT as well? First, and somewhat deconstructively, if the major proportion of stylistic variation in the GNT were found to be due to genre rather than authorship—or even close to it—any prior studies that had (1) failed to test for genre as a competing theory or (2) failed to remove genre as a covariate have almost certainly confounded genre with authorship. Second, and more constructively, if a convincing separation between what is commonly termed authorial variation and the various sources of sociolectic variation (which include component as genre/register, subject matter, audience, and the like) can be achieved, such a thing would have broad and sweeping impact upon many topoi within New Testament scholarship. Not only would it influence the obvious suspects (i.e. the authorship of the Pastoral Epistles, the extent of the Pauline Canon, pseudepigraphy, the Synoptic Problem, and the like) it would also necessarily influence the current vigorous discourse in New Testament hermeneutics itself. My approach is threefold. First, the history of computational stylistics both within and outside NT studies will be reviewed. Second, as to method, an abductive approach, one that harnesses both Systemic Functional Linguistics and a variety of univariate and multivariate methods will be adopted. Third, that method will be exercised on the text of the Greek New Testament itself.