Join us this Thursday evening for our final Linguistics Circle for the academic year. We are pleased to have a guest presenter, Dr. Jermo Van Nes, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Evangelische Theologische Faculteit (ETF) in Leuven, Belgium. His paper is entitled: “Second Century Vocabulary in the Pastoral Epistles? A Reassessment.” The paper can be accessed on the CBLTE forum. If you do not have access, please contact Doosuk Kim (cblte@mcmaster.ca). Below is an abstract of the paper.
Many contemporary New Testament scholars consider 1-2 Timothy and Titus, collectively known as the Pastoral Epistles (PE), to be pseudonymous. Some of them do so on the basis of the PE’s comparatively large number of hapax legomena (hapaxes), which they believe is closer to writings of the second century AD. The aim of this paper is to reconsider this influential thesis as advocated by P.N. Harrison over the course of the twentieth century. It will be argued that the (statistical) evidence presented by Harrison is flawed as he gives no proper definition of hapaxes, unevenly compares the PE collectively to individual writings, and does not use any criteria to show how his results are statistically significant. By way of alternative, this paper will (1) provide a proper definition of hapaxes, (2) count how many of these hapaxes recur in all Greek second-century writings classified as such in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecaedatabase, and (3) by means of (simple) linear regression analysis determine whether or not 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and/or Titus in comparison to each of the other undisputed Pauline letters share significantly more hapaxes with these second-century writings.
As usual, we will be meeting via Webex, 7-9pm (EDT). All are welcome, so join us for an exciting discussion on the Pastoral Epistles, vocabulary, and authorship.