Counting Paul: Scientificity, Fuzzy Math, and Ideology in Pauline Studies

by Benjamin L. White

Who wrote the Pauline Epistles? For nearly 1,700 years the answer seemed fairly straightforward. The New Testament canon set the boundary at thirteen (or fourteen, including Hebrews) Pauline Epistles, alongside an uncontroversial biographical framework within which to imagine them in Acts. In the early nineteenth century the identification of the historical Paul with the canonical Paul was severed when theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur of the University of Tübingen laid the groundwork for the fundamental historiographical moves that still orient Pauline Studies as a critical discipline by both delimiting the number of authentic Pauline Epistles and highlighting the tendentious character of Acts' portrayal of Paul.

Given the highly uncertain and subjective nature of so much of the argumentation over the authenticity of the Pauline Epistles as it developed in the nineteenth century, the analysis of authorial style took on increasing weight as a way out of so many special decisions. The linguistic features of texts were counted, averaged, and compared. In measuring one text against another, the Pauline stylome emerged as the incontrovertible standard for uncovering canonical forgeries in the Apostle's name.

Tracing the long history of the computational approach to the Pauline authorship problem, Counting Paul exposes the ideological foundations and questionable science of much of the work and argues that Pauline biography ought not be written from fewer sources than what the New Testament has given us, but rather more. It advocates for a more expansive vision of what might count as Pauline by reorienting our focus away from internal criteria, like appeals to style, and toward external criteria, like the reception of Paul in the generations after his death.

288 pages, Hardcover

Published April 29, 2025

Reviews

[Davis Sutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work. If you’re looking for a fresh, new answer to the maddening question of Pauline authorship, look no further. White’s book is fascinating and helpful. His writing is really accessible—great academic prose. The few chapters engaging in the digital humanities were dense, as they were introducing many new concepts to me. That said, his argumentation was really engaging and I found myself largely persuaded by many of his conclusions. Also, if you’re interested in the ongoing war against FC Baur and the pillars of Pauline studies established by him the field takes for granted this book will be perfect for you. We’ve largely moved past Baur’s “Petrine vs Pauline” argument assumed for so long, so why should we not move past his arguments about what counts as Paul?

[Nick Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars. This is an impressive work of scholarship. White exposes both the anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic ideology which sat at the heart of the still foundational attempts to uncover an historical core to the Pauline letter collection of the New Testament, a kind of Archimedean point from which to anchor historical inquiries. All of that is well known, if not emphasized enough. Nevertheless, it attained an air of scientificity through quantifiable linguistic tests applied to the corpus, and these White has subjected to painstaking evaluation, after which he gives the results of his own stylometric analysis informed by current best practices and conducted alongside leading institutions in the field. The results: there's no basis for the current 7 letter preference, excluding Ephesians and Colossians and 2 Thessalonians. The corpus divides into several sub groups, from which 2 Tim sits by itself and among which 1 Tim and Titus are the most remote. White is careful to add that such tests do not on their own identify authorship. In the final part of the book White advances a new paradigm for Pauline studies, and it's here that I'm not totally convinced. He suggests our functional Archimedean point of departure should be the reception of Paul in the second century, for after all, even our earliest letter collection and manuscripts are second century creations. It is working backwards from here that we will be able to make our best judgments regarding authenticity. He contrasts this approach with that of Luke Timothy Johnson, who recognizing the sorts of methodological problems White details, opts for the canonical Paul and explains differences in the corpus via Paul's co-workers and scribes. White's approach can only be justified here if the letter collection is judged to be significantly compromised textually. If on the other hand we can have reasonable confidence that the majority of these letters give us a largely accurate copy of the things Paul wrote then it seems we still have the logical starting point or controlling centre (perhaps a better metaphor) for historical work. We need not assume that everything is original and we might ultimately hold some texts in suspension or doubt. That said, historical work on Paul still can and probably should take advantage of the Second Century reception of Paul as sites of social memory that can help to inform historical judgements. But it seems that in advocating for this approach as the privileged starting point, White has fallen into the familiar trap of claiming too much for one's own prized pony, a pony which it turns out won't get you that far after all.