Authorship attribution applied to the Bible

Date

2003-08

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Texas Tech University

Abstract

In this thesis, we make a statistical comparison between the biblical book of Ephesians and four Pauline Epistles, namely, I Corinthians, Romans, II Corinthians, and Galatians. Using the frequency distribution of nouns, we perform two kinds of statistical analysis: a frequentist and a Bayesian analysis. Using the frequentist approach, we compare measures of vocabulary connectivity for the five books. Using the multivariate delta method, we derive the standard errors of these measures, and compute their values for the five books. For the five said books, we calculate three measures of vocabulary richness cited by Holmes (1992). Then we construct the corresponding theoretical parameters for these measures and we find the posterior means and posterior standard errors of these parameters by utilizing Bayesian analysis.

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Availability

Unrestricted.

Keywords

Literary, Authorship, Style, Linguistics -- Statistical methods, Mathematical linguistics, Data procedure, Bayesian statistical decision theory, Disputed

Citation