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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I'm also not an expert but, I said Aramaic because that's what Sid, my dad said was the earliest recorded script. Web searches suggest its a matter of discussion.

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In any event the debate is which letters were or were not written by Paul. There is no reason to suspect he wrote none of them, or at least none were transcribed them to secretary. The debate is which was written by him and which were not.

Your father may have claimed it was very obvious, but nobody else thinks so.

His research focus outside of computer science was stylometry and statistical analysis of authorship. I suspect contextually he was saying it was obvious from a form of analysis. He was a Jewish athiest and completely uninterested in the biblical scholarship questions. His collaborator, rev Morton was a parish minister in the church of Scotland. He used to joke you could be a very good scots minister without worrying about God very much.

Golb's son idolised his father maybe too much. I wouldn't be committing crimes to defend Sid's stylometry results.

I've heard of these types of statistical analyses before, but they always sounded a bit suspicious to me. Have they been verified on known datasets? i.e., if I used your fathers techniques on your comment history, would it find that it was authored by a single person, or would it think there was a committee of you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry is as good a reference as any to the methodologies. I know pointing people at Wikipedia is a bit passé but it gives a good summary.

I think the answer to your implied criticisms would be, "it depends"

That honestly doesn't seem very likely, given the content and audience of the epistles. The epistles repeatedly mention that Paul considers himself the apostle to the gentiles, and most are written to Greek cities. Even saying the Jewish diaspora in those cities retained Aramaic as a daily or religious language, Paul (or even a committee posing as Paul) would have been unlikely to write the letters in such a way as to exclude the Greek christians in those cities.

Further, as others have mentioned, the consensus is overwhelming that Greek was the original language for the pauline epistles, to the point where I can't even find any contradictory views. That's not to say the consensus is correct, but if there is debate, it's not widespread.

Do you know what evidence your dad had for Aramaic being the original language? A search for "aramaic manuscripts of pauline epistles" turns up no results discussing the topic.

"Aramaic priority" is the term if you want to find more information. It's a crank theory.

He died in 1990, but I think would have been delighted to be put in the "crank theoretician bucket in this space, it was a sideline to his work in numerical analysis, vlsi and academic computer sciences. The field of stylometry has come on leaps and bounds since the 1970s and 1980s.

They got people off forged confessions, most of the stylometry work they did was in english, against contemporary documents. Diving into the past was more for fun. The corpus is small and subject to the vagueness of time and editing.

Do you know what evidence your dad had for Aramaic being the original language?

I think I've been misunderstood. Aramaic was the earliest text for which people had high confidence in its transcription from whatever lay underneath. We don't have autograph works, we have copies in varying degrees of fidelity across time, space, language and religious schism.

Did he think aramaic was the origin language? Yes. I believe he did. But, its an outsider theory. Whats less outsider is the age of the text variant, and subsequent divergences.

Thanks, will look into it

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