Digital Biblical Studies7 Statistical Approaches to Paul’s Letters

This book explores statistical and computational methods to describing, analysing, and comparing Paul’s letters, with chapters including a qualitative review of the field’s history, methodological remarks, analyses of statistical distributions, forms of data visualisation, multi-variate cluster mapping, and topology. This book demonstrates the utility of statistical and computational approaches to Paul’s letters. Such work helps resolve questions of authorship, describes and quantifies aspects of Paul’s style, and explains structural relationships within and between Paul’s letters. A series of linked case studies deploy a shared set of top-down stylistic features to differentially analyse Paul’s seven undisputed letters. Each chapter explores a different digital approach, co-written with a subject expert in this method. Chapters range from a history of the field to theoretical branches of mathematics, with each chapter providing a case study applying a different method to issues within Pauline Studies, with progressively more sophisticated statistical, computational, and mathematical models.