Compare methods

	Authorship Attribution of Canonical Texts	Source Criticism (Documentary Hypothesis)
Field	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
Family	Machine learning	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2019	1885
Originator	Tradition from Mosteller & Wallace and A. Q. Morton; Pauline corpus revisited by Jacques Savoy	Julius Wellhausen (classic synthesis); popularized by Richard Elliott Friedman
Type	Classification/verification pipeline assigning disputed texts to candidate authors	Document-separation pipeline reconstructing the written sources of a text
Seminal source	Savoy, J. (2019). Authorship of Pauline epistles revisited. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 70(10), 1089-1097.	Wellhausen, J. (1885). Prolegomena to the History of Israel (trans. J. S. Black & A. Menzies). Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black. [Cambridge Library Collection reprint]. ISBN: 9781108053822
Aliases	Computational Authorship Attribution, Authorship Verification of Scripture, Pauline Authorship Analysis, Disputed-Text Attribution	Literarkritik, Documentary Hypothesis, JEDP Analysis, Pentateuchal Source Criticism
Related	4	4
Summary	Authorship attribution of canonical texts uses computational stylometry to test who wrote disputed sacred and classical writings, most famously the letters attributed to Paul. Several New Testament epistles bear Paul's name but have long been suspected, on historical and stylistic grounds, of coming from later hands; stylometry brings quantitative evidence to the question. The approach profiles each author's style from large numbers of features, especially function-word frequencies, and either classifies a disputed text to the closest candidate or verifies whether it could plausibly belong to a claimed author against a field of impostors. Jacques Savoy's 2019 study revisited the entire Pauline corpus with modern methods, including Burrows's Delta, and found that it clusters into groups consistent with the traditional distinction between undisputed and disputed letters.	Source criticism (Literarkritik) seeks the written documents that lie behind a composite biblical text. Its most famous result is the Documentary Hypothesis, the claim that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was woven together from four originally independent sources, conventionally labeled J, E, D, and P. The hypothesis grew over the nineteenth century and received its classic synthesis from Julius Wellhausen, whose 1878 Prolegomena to the History of Israel argued that the sources reflect successive stages in the development of Israelite religion. Richard Elliott Friedman's 1987 Who Wrote the Bible? presented the theory to a wide audience with vivid arguments for who wrote each source and when. Source criticism separates the strands by criteria such as the divine name used, doublets, vocabulary, style, and theology, then reconstructs how a redactor combined them.