style and pseudonymity in pauline scholarship 145
letters result from latin loan words, for example,84 but bilingual interfer-
ence from latin could also have implications for reduced use of particles
and smoother syntax, an issue particularly relevant for the Pastorals.85
increase in latinity is one of the primary distinctives pseudonymity advo-
cates insist on.86 however, given Paul’s tenure in rome, an increase in
latin interference may not be unexpected.87
Register Designed “Style” and Vocabulary
features of co-textual variation between register profiles 2–4 and 5 are
traditionally asserted as evidence of pseudonymity. however, they can
just as easily—and in some cases, more convincingly—be interpreted as
instances of register designed language by a single author in response to
social change, since the levels of co-textual variation in the Pauline corpus
tend to be broadly consistent with the findings of studies examining style-
shift in a single author with significant change in register. i group style
and vocabulary under one heading because, in traditional analysis, the
former usually collapses into the latter—it seems clear that an author’s
vocabulary would be just one of many features of their style, not some-
thing distinct from it. for example, one of the so-called “stylistic” features
that harrison posits is the density of α-privatives and φιλο-initial words
in the Pastorals over against the rest the of Pauline letters—essentially,
types of vocabulary.88 it also can serve as the basis for our first evaluation
of Pauline style-shift. using harrison’s data, which calculates the percent-
age of occurrences in each letter against words per page in the edition of
the gnt that he was using, we can set this style-shift variable along the
dimension of contextual variation laid out above:
son, The Pastoral Epistles (london: tyndale Press, 1954), 20–22; turner, Style, 104–105; alan
millard, “latin in first-century Palestine,” in Ziony Zevit, Seymour gitin and michael
Sokoloff (eds.), Solving Riddles and Untying Knots (Winona lake, in: eisenbrauns, 1995),
451–58; marshall and towner, Pastoral Epistles, 63.
84 See Stanley e. Porter, “did Paul Speak latin?” in Stanley e. Porter (ed.), Paul: Jew,
Greek, and Roman (PaSt 5; leiden: Brill, 2008), 304–305.
85 turner, Style, 104.
86 See Quinn, Titus, 5, for a recent example.
87 for example, nancy c. dorian, “Stylistic Variation in language restricted to Private
Sphere use,” in Biber and finegan (eds.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives, 217–34, demonstrated
a significant increase in the density of loanwords in her landlady’s speech over a period
of only four years.
88 harrison, Problem, 44.