Detail map of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom Overview map of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

A: Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Andrew Q. Morton Applies Computing to Authorship of the Pauline Epistles

1963

In 1963 Scottish clergyman Rev. Andrew Q. Morton published an article in a British newspaper claiming that, according to his work with a computer at the University of Edinburgh St Paul only wrote four of his epistles. A pioneer in stylometry, Morton based his claim on word counts of common words in the Greek text, plus some elementary statistics. He continued to examine a variety of Greek texts, producing more papers and books concentrating on an examination of the frequencies of common words (usually particles) and also on sentence lengths, even though the punctuation identifying sentences was added to the Greek texts by editors long after the Pauline Epistles were written.

Morton, The Authorship of the Pauline Epistles: A Scientific Solution. Saskatoon, 1965. 

Morton, A. Q. and Winspear, A. D. It's Greek to the Computer. Montreal, 1971.

A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Timeline Themes