132 andrew w. pitts
Jesus as the Jewish messiah. Based on this encounter, he was quickly
promoted within the movement to the position of apostle and commis-
sioned to expand the primitive church through the urban gentile mission.
his mission turned out to be quite successful—even if very painful, at
times—planting churches in several urban capitals in the greco-roman
world. he entered cities and typically did not stay long after planting a
church there (ephesus being an obvious exception) and his pattern was
to write letters back to the house churches he founded, once he arrived
at (or perhaps on the way to) another city if an issue should arise or if
the traditions he transmitted to the community got distorted due to the
influence of false teachers. acts leaves off with Paul on trial, the outcome
of which is not known (apparently not even by luke, at the time of writ-
ing). Some of these things may be debated, but this is the basic picture
that emerges.
this set of social distinctives in our addressor will likely result in a
range of stable linguistic features that surface across Paul’s letters. the
consistency of the epistolary genre should also create some stability that
has commonality not only within the Pauline canon, but also with other
letters in the new testament. Without validating every detail of each of
their methodologies, the broad consistency of the conclusions in the stud-
ies of anthony Kenny,53 george Barr,54 matthew Brook o’donnell,55 and
53 anthony Kenny, A Stylometric Study of the New Testament (oxford: clarendon, 1986),
80–100, draws attention to a number of stable elements across all 13 letters. Several of his
96 quantifiable features are consistent throughout the Pauline corpus. conjunction usage,
for example, remains quite stable with most letters falling fairly closely to the average of
13.36%. the variation on each end of the distribution scale is 1 corinthians (15.8%) and
colossians (9.67%). Kenny also plots out a scale of which letters are most “comfortable”
in the Pauline corpus according to his 96 features, in the following order from greatest to
least: “romans, Philippians, 2 timothy, 2 corinthians, galatians, 2 thessalonians, 1 thes-
salonians, colossians, ephesians, 1 timothy, 1 corinthians, titus” (98). all but titus exhibit
a great deal of continuity with one another.
54 Barr, Scalometry, 36–41 and esp. 50–97, highlights the existence of “prime patterns” at
the beginning of all 13 of Paul’s letters, located on the basic of sentence length distribution
and sequence. george K. Barr, “interpretations, Pseudographs, and the new testament
epistles,” LLC 17 (2002): 443, considers the possibility of a pseudonymous author imitating
this pattern and concludes that “[e]xperiment has shown that it is very difficult to write a
piece with convincing Pauline patterns even when the structure is understood.”
55 o’donnell, Corpus Linguistics, 228, shows that when compared in terms of a token
(number of vocabulary)-type (number of distinctive vocabulary) ratio, romans (0.375) is
semantically closer to 1 timothy (0.419) than to 1 corinthians (0.267), meaning elements
of stability shared between “disputed” material not shared with “undisputed” letters. Simi-
larly, o’donnell, Corpus Linguistics, 166, plots a dendrogram illustrating semantic clus-
tering within the new testament plus the Didache that shows all of the Pauline letters
registering within the 50–75 range (out of 0–350), with the exception of Philemon, which
comes in around 125. compare that to the Synoptic gospels, which cluster around the