Pauline authorship

I figured I'd look around at what the nerds are saying about Paul's epistles these days. A Swiss guy Jacques Savoy has one: "Authorship of Pauline Epistles Revisited" (pdf). He's using statistics. In his case, Burrows’ Delta and Labbé’s intertextual distance.

For my part, I distrust "stylometric" statistics when looking into Holy Scriptures. That's because the urge to forge is high. About a decade back, Behnam Sadeghi made such an effort with the Quran. He found that most suwar look like they all came from the same author. The notion that the later suwar might have aped earlier ones, with precisely the intent to prove that God wrote the later ones like He did the earlier ones... that didn't seem to occur to the man. It also didn't occur to the man that poetry, relying upon stock phrases as it does, even saj', is particularly easy to forge in this manner.

As far as Savoy goes, he's working with prose. You don't do stock phrases there. Savoy's method offered more promise here than it would on the Quran.

Savoy ended up with a cluster of 1-2 Corinthians, Romans, and Galatians. Romans and Galatians can be expected to cluster given that Romans is pretty much Galatians' sequel. It is nice that he'd caught those other two in his net as well. Peripherally, he could hook Philippians with Galatians alone, 1 Thessalonians with 2 Corinthians alone, and 2 Thessalonians with the First. Colossians and "Ephesians" (="Laodicians", for Marcion) sit in their own cluster; same with the Pastorals. Philemon is a "singleton".

Mostly this agrees with the consensus of Paul scholars.

Philippians has the added wrinkle that it's a commentary upon a hymn. I think only the commentary is deemed Pauline. Perhaps Paul did that as a one-off and didn't expect the letter to get copied. Colossians meanwhile claims itself as a dual composition by Paul and Timothy; perhaps it actually is, and then Timothy wrote the whole of "Ephesians" by himself.

2 Thessalonians is considered someone else's rework of 1 Thessalonians; the Colossians-"Ephesians" group, although steeped in the other Paul letters including 1 Thess, don't bother with 2 Thess. Hebrews doesn't either.

I think that this is where Savoy's method runs into trouble. It can't tell certain fan-fiction based on Paul, like 2 Thess; from genuine(?) Paul doing a one-off, like Philippians.

UPDATE 11/17: I hear that a sober look at stylophrenology came out last April. Hythem Sidky.