160 jermo van nes
Fifth, the PE are compared with the 10 Paulines, but each Pauline letter
with 9 others. By grouping the PE together, O’Rourke observes, (1) “the
number of peculiar words increases by reason of the addition of the words
peculiar to each of them plus the number of words peculiar to two or
more of them not found in other members of the Pauline corpus” and
(2) “the total vocabulary decreases by reason of the subtraction of repeti-
tions of words found in two or more members.”27 Upon comparison, the
relationship of the vocabulary peculiar to the PE and their total vocabulary
is about the same as that of Romans and 1 Corinthians. The latter have a
total vocabulary stock of 1419 different words of which 574 are not found
elsewhere in the Pauline corpus (40.4%), while the PE have 901 different
words to their text of which 333 are Pastoral hapaxes (37.1%). Similarly, it
has been shown that there are 114 indeclinable words which can be found
in at least two New Testament letters attributed to Paul except for the
Thessalonian correspondence. Thus when 1 and 2 Thessalonians are taken
together, a similar, even better, case can be made for their non-Pauline
authorship as based on the absence of Pauline indeclinables.28 In particu-
lar, the British statistician Anthony Kenny demonstrated that individual
study of the Pauline epistles yields different results than corporal study.
Analyzing 99 linguistic features for each individual letter (except Titus,
which is too short in length), he saw “no reason to reject the hypothesis
that twelve of the Pauline Epistles are the work of a single, unusually ver-
satile author.”29
Finally, most of the 306 Pastoral hapaxes found by Harrison occur in
only one of the PE and differ from one another as much as they differ
from the non-Pastoral Paulines.30 The assumption of vocabulary consis-
tency among the acknowledged letters of Paul was first questioned by
Montgomery Hitchcock. He points out that there is as great a difference
in hapax usage between 2 Corinthians 1–8 (2 per page) and 10–13 (5.5 per
page) as there is between 2 Corinthians and each of the PE (ranging from
9 to 10.5 per page). In addition, Hitchcock notes that a similar amount
of Pastoral hapaxes can be found in the ethical sections of Philippians
4:8–20 (11.1 per page), Romans 12:6–16 (9.1 per page), and 1 Thessalonians
27 O’Rourke, “Considerations,” 486.
28 Cf. Roberts, “Particles,” 136.
29 A. Kenny, A Stylometric Study of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 100.
30 Cf. D. A. Carson and D. J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament (2nd ed.;
Leicester: Apollos, 2005), 556–57.