the problem of the pastoral epistles 159
are included in his list, although the argument turns upon what is called
Paul’s “habitual” usage.22
Third, arguments are reused in order to built a cumulative case which
serves as a stage army. According to James Gilchrist,
Harrison repeated his arguments in three ways: (1) he failed to realise the
interrelations between various sets of figures; (2) in certain cases, having
discovered a figure for the Pastorals which exceeded a parallel figure for
the Paulines, he would then, without realising his mistake, divide this into
subclasses, each of which, not surprisingly, gave a figure for the Pastorals
which also exceeded a comparable figure for other Paulines; (3) after giving
certain arguments in numerical form, he attempted a diagrammatic presen-
tation which added nothing to what had gone before, beyond a questionable
clarification.23
Fourth, words are counted per page rather than per text. Donald Guthrie
explains that this particular method had been used 25 years earlier by
Walter Workman in an attempt to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s lan-
guage showed similar variations to Paul’s.24 Whether or not this compari-
son is valid,25 the problem of Harrison’s method was clearly pointed out
by Wilhelm Michaelis. According to Harrison, he argued, Romans has 10
hapaxes per page while Colossians has 9.7. However, Romans has 993 dif-
ferent words of which 261 are hapaxes, which in fact means that it has a
ratio of 261/993 = 0.263. For Colossians, this number is 58/409 = 0.142. For
1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus the numbers are 173/529 = 0.327, 114/413 =
0.276, and 81/293 = 0.276 respectively. This means that there is a greater
variety in the frequency of hapaxes in the texts of Colossians and Romans
than in the texts of the PE, and that the frequency of hapaxes found in the
text of Romans is about the same for 2 Timothy and Titus.26
22 Cf. J. W. Roberts, “The Bearing of the Use of Particles on the Authorship of the Pas-
toral Epistles,” ResQ 2 (1958): 134.
23 J. M. Gilchrist, “The Authorship and Date of the Pastoral Epistles” (Ph.D. thesis, Uni-
versity of Manchester, 1966), 34. Other unpublished theses on Harrison’s work include
C. Spain, “The Pastoral Epistles” (M.A. thesis, Southern Methodist University, 1946); H. E. Payne,
“Studies in the Pastoral Epistles” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas, 1948); and L. F. Clark, “An
Investigation of Some Applications of Quantitative Methods to the Pauline Letters, with a
View to the Question of Authorship” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 1979).
24 Cf. D. Guthrie, The Pastoral Epistles (TNTC 14; Leicester: InterVarsity, 1957; repr.
1988), 213, referring to W.P. Workman, “The Hapax Legomena of St. Paul,” ExpTim 7 (1896):
418–19.
25 See the detailed critique of Harrison, Problem, 59–65.
26 Cf. W. Michaelis, “Pastoralbriefe und Wortstatistik,” ZNW 28 (1929): 72–73; G. W.
Knight III, The Pastoral Epistles (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 39–40; O’Donnell,
“Linguistic Fingerprints,” 234.