style and pseudonymity in pauline scholarship 133
armin Baum56 all indicating a great deal of continuity according to vari-
ous linguistic features across the Pauline corpus, seems noteworthy.
A Pauline Register Profile Landscape
Social change logically and chronologically precedes language so we will
want to organize the Pauline corpus first (as much as we can) in terms of
how it groups along the contextual dimension of the register design model
articulated above. the Pauline canon constitutes what those working in
historical corpus linguistics refer to as a diachronic corpus, involving writ-
ings composed in “temporally ordered stages,”57 a topic of increasingly
popular interest within the field. organizing sets of data from these cor-
pora along their compositional chronology becomes important for detect-
ing variation generated by a document’s location in time.
this diachronic trajectory provides a basis for configuring an initial reg-
ister component that unites several groups of Pauline letters: time. new
testament scholars have for a long time divided the Pauline corpus (how-
ever that is defined, in terms of authorship) into earlier and later letters.58
letters written in Paul’s early years include (in no specific order) 1–2 thes-
salonians, galatians, 1–2 corinthians and romans. Kirsopp lake recog-
nized early on that this corpus of Pauline letters formed what we might
call a basic “register” (not his term) that addressed similar issues from the
perspective of a similar historical situation.59 later in Paul’s life we have
zero (matthew/luke)-25 (mark) mark or 1 John, which comes in at around 300. most other
letters (with the exception of 1 John) come within Paul’s in the 50–75 score. So this indi-
cates stability likely resulting from consistency in genre across the Pauline letter-writing
register. 1 John probably diverges from other new testament letters since it is the least
developed in terms of its epistolary form (minimal use of letter formulas, very loose letter
structure, etc.) and composed in the closest thing to vulgar greek language form that we
find in the new testament.
56 Baum, “Semantic Variation,” 271–92, zeroes in on Pauline vocabulary and shows that,
while the Pastorals do have a significant density of unique vocabulary, these lexemes can
be connected to fairly close synonyms (e.g., 70 of the 83 found in titus). While the Pasto-
rals do not always match the exact lexical realizations we find in the other ten letters, they
do match the semantic domain profiles Paul uses within a very close proximity, forming
semantic chains, across the Pauline corpus (Baum, “Semantic Variation,” 278–85).
57 martin hilpert and Stephan th. gries, “assessing frequency changes in multistage
diachronic corpora: applications for historical corpus linguistics and the Study of lan-
guage acquisition,” LLC 24 (2009): 385.
58 as far back as J. B. lightfoot, “the chronology of St Paul’s life and letters,” in light-
foot, Biblical Essays (london: macmillan, 1893; based upon his lecture notes of 1863),
215–33; W. g. Kümmel, “futuristic and realized eschatology in the earliest Stages of chris-
tianity,” JR 43 (1963): 303–14.
59 Kirsopp lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (london: rivingtons, 1911).