Authorship Attribution of Canonical Texts

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.