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  • From: "David C. Hindley" <DHindley AT compuserve.com>
  • To: corpus-paul
  • Subject: Re: Neumann review
  • Date: Sat, 8 May 1999 12:38:3


On 05/03/99, ""Sheila E. McGinn, Ph.D." <smcginn AT jcu.edu>" wrote:

> "Stephen C. Carlson" wrote:
>
> > At 08:53 PM 5/2/99 -0400, John C. Hurd wrote:
> > > And closer to home is Kenneth J. Neumann's, "The Authenticity of the
> > > Pauline
> > Epistles in the Light of Stylostatistical Analysis" ("SBL dissertation
> > series, 120;
> > Atlanta, GA: Scholar's Press, 1990). He was
> > >my student, and I was his director and am his friend.
> >
> > Would you (or anyone else) care to summarize Neumann's conclusions?

> I did a critical review of this piece a few years back (when it first came
> out). I
> will be happy to send it to the list as a WP attachment. However, I want
> to warn
> folks in advance, for the sake of those who are careful with such things
> and may want
> to delete the message rather than reading it. I will use the same subject
> heading as
> on this message. (By way of reassurance, I have just run my virus-checker
> and my PC
> is clean.) John Hurd may then want to respond to the review, or send his
> own
> comments.
>
> Sheila
>

I had a little trouble retreiving the message, as I get my posts via the
digest, and Lyris seems to convert some data weirdly. However, I cleaned it
up in MS Word and found the review very interesting.

Years ago I picked up a copy of A. Q. Morton & James McLeman's _Paul, The
Man and the Myth_ (1966). The analysis was relatively crude, even by the
standards of the 60's, and I did not quite follow the methods they employed
to determine the statistical significance of the relationships they
detected.

I agree with you that "Neumann's use of multileveled multivariate analysis
is a tremendous methodological advance over previous attempts at stylistic
analysis of the Biblical material." When I encountered the book (early
1980's, I think) I wondered why something like multileveled multivariate
analysis had not been applied to the data. However, when I encountered this
analytic tool (1978) it was so new that my professor could not even find a
textbook that dealt with it (substituting photocopies of a published
example study that employed it), so perhaps it was not available to Morton
& McLeman.

My comments on your review of Neumann's book are these:

>> Neumann employs the population model, which entails applying various
indices of style to six of the undisputed letters (the Hauptbriefe, 1
Thess, Phil; Phlm is omitted because of its brevity), and then to a group
of texts which definitely are not Pauline (initially Heb, 1 Clem, and
letters of Ignatius, Philo, Epictetus, and Josephus). <<

>> Finally the disputed letters are measured "by those indices which
clearly distinguish the various authors, especially those setting off the
Pauline from the non Pauline literature. These indices combined by the
multivariate technique of discriminant analysis should indicate the
probability that the letters belong with the Pauline corpus or with the
writings of other authors." <<

It appears to me that Neumann is setting up the analysis to prove what he
has already determined. By using pre-defined sets of undisputed and
disputed letters, isn't he really comparing the sets rather than
identifying authorship?

As for the level of statistical significance, the F-test is definitely the
proper tool to use for multileveled multivariate analysis. Whether we have
a valid samlple size, well that is another. We need to know the size of the
universe population (that is, the totality of everything written by Paul),
and of course we do not know that at all. Consequently, we can only
determine the significance between samples.

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, OH
Dhindley AT compuserve.com




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