False choices - faith or science

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@Vinnie

Remember, Paul wrote personal letters in Greek 2,000 years ago. A vocabulary study on modern works of a different language and of a different genre is absurd in and of itself to compare to this.

What, pray tell, is absurd about it?

Languages and genres may be different but there are still common principles by which they operate. There are also common principles by which methodologies in general operate, and one of those principles is that if you want to establish that your methodology works, you need to test it against something of known provenance. It’s called “having a control.”

@Vinnie

This requires you to actually read the many scholarly vocabulary studies done on Paul. It requires you to understand them and then show how applying that same methodology to works written by CS Lewis is applicable. What might be better is applying it to all of the chronicles of Narnia. They are the same genre and written half a decade or so apart (I think). So if some methodology could be applied to both Paul and them equally and fairly, and it showed CS Lewis didn’t write them all then we could question it.

Try Tolkien. The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. They are not only the same genre by the same author, but they are about the same fantasy world. But as @Daniel_Fisher pointed out in the thread to which I linked:

@Daniel_Fisher

I would love to take The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and subject them to the methods used. From changing terminology (using the word “goblin” to “orc”), to changing the Runic alphabet, to the overall darker tone, to the higher vocabulary, to the sentence length, to the various lighthearted narrator’s commentaries to the reader in The Hobbit that are entirely absent in LOTR (e.g., “Gandalf came by. Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale.”)… all these observations are the very sort used by NT scholars to conclusively demonstrate different authorship among Paul’s letters.

@Daniel_Fisher

These are exactly the kinds of arguments and observations used to prove Paul didn’t write said disputed epistles. Keeps me very skeptical of how effective any such methods could ever be. (And I didn’t even bring The Silmarillion into the discussion. If I trusted the methods of these NT scholars, I would have to conclude that Tolkien’s corpus was composed by no less than 3 authors.)

I appreciate the other points that you’ve been making. There are other lines of evidence that we can and should take into account. But my whole point is that literary criticism of any form is not an exact science like physics, chemistry, geology or test-driven software development. It is a humanities subject, and as such it concerns the vagaries of humans and other living beings. This being the case, things aren’t going to be quite as black-and-white as when you type computer code into Visual Studio and then run a suite of tests to make sure that it does what you expect it to do. It will be a lot harder to establish just how reliable your conclusions are for starters.

Or to put it another way. For each of the epistles in the New Testament that are ascribed to Paul that are disputed by scholars, what confidence level can you assign to the thesis that Paul had nothing whatsoever to do with them? And how, precisely, can you calculate that confidence level?