The Authorship of the Pastorals in the Light of Statistical Linguistics

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Abstract
The authorship of the Pastorals must have been among the first instances inviting the application of quantitative methods in literature. Schleiermacher's [1] critical campaign against the authenticity of I Timothy uses a great array of hapax legomena for establishing the linguistic peculiarity of that Epistle. The controversy continued on these lines, subsequent workers using linguistic criteria to a greater or lesser extent according to the value they attributed to them. This continued until 1921 when Harrison's book on The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles [2] appeared, in which he presented such overwhelming linguistic evidence against Paul's authorship that most workers regarded the controversy as closed. However, this was not so, and Harrison's procedure has been subjected from time to time to a certain amount of criticism, for example, by W. Michaelis [3, 4], F. R. M. Hitchcock [5, 6], D. Guthrie [7] and B. M. Metzger [8].

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