166 jermo van nes
expansion was not intended to make the letters “look” Pauline; rather,
it was motivated by the community’s desire to preserve the traditions
and to be instructed by them.”58 In support, Miller points to both Jewish
( Jeremiah, Isaiah, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and Christian writings
(the Didache, Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians, and the Epistle to Diog-
netus), which are also widely thought to be composed of several layers
of traditional material. Similarly, the PE could have originated from a
scribal community similar to that of Qumran which was zealous to pre-
serve sacred traditions.
However, fragment theories like that of Harrison and Miller have been
seriously challenged by the work of George Barr.59 Central to his overall
project is the concept of “scale.” Defined as “the proportion which the rep-
resentation of an object bears to the object itself,”60 scale is found in vari-
ous disciplines like architecture, art, literature, and music. In literature,
scale is concerned with the texture of the material rather than with the
overall size and is expressed in sentence length, which is the best measure
of the texture of materials. Barr gives the example of Ephesians, which is
about one third of the length of Romans, but the scale of the former is
about one and a half times that of the latter. A short piece of literature
may have a monumental quality, indicating a large scale. In his major
study Scalometry and the Pauline Epistles, Barr applies this overall theory
of scalometry (“the measurement of scale and its effects in literature”)61
to the Pauline corpus. Presented in cumulative sum graphs, he analyzes
the mean sentence length of all New Testament letters attributed to Paul
in relation to other pieces of literature in order to see (dis)similarities in
scale patterns. Overall, Barr finds embedded prime patterns within each
letter which prove characteristic for single authorship.62 For the PE, the
only exceptions allowed to be potential second-century interpolations
58 Miller, Pastoral Letters, 146.
59 G. K. Barr, “Scale and the Pauline Epistles,” IBS 17 (1995): 22–41; “Contrasts in Scale
and Genre in the Letters of Paul and Seneca,” IBS 18 (1996): 16–25; “Literary Dependence in
the New Testament Epistles,” IBS 19 (1997): 148–60; “The Use of Cumulative Sum Graphs in
Literary Scalometry,” LLC 12 (1997): 103–111; “Scalometry and the Dating of the New Testa-
ment Epistles,” IBS 22 (2000): 71–90; “A Computer Model for the Pauline Epistles,” LLC 16
(2001): 233–50; “Graphical Analysis of the Sentence Length Distribution Curve and Non-
rational Components,” LLC 16 (2001): 375–88; “Interpolations, Pseudographs, and the New
Testament Epistles,” LLC 17 (2002): 438–55; “The Impact of Scalometry on New Testament
Letters,” LLC 18 (2003): 36–50; “Two Styles in the New Testament Epistles,” LLC 18 (2003):
235–48; Scalometry and the Pauline Epistles ( JSNTSup 261; London: T&T Clark, 2004).
60 Barr, Scalometry, 7.
61 Barr, Scalometry, 1.
62 Barr, Scalometry, 49–97.