Computers And The Authorship Of The Bible

By Author: Johnon Philip
Total Articles: 90
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Computers have descended upon us as magical tools of modern science. Their astonishing speed and their capacity to manipulate vast amounts of data have filled the minds of people with awe. A numerical problem which would require an entire year of manual calculation can today be solved in a day with the help of computers. As a consequence computers are viewed with awe, and it was no wonder when Christians shuddered a few years ago when a scholar claimed that his computer has disproved the traditional views about the epistles of St. Paul.

His analysis were extended by many others, and almost every one of them came to conclusions which opposed the historical beliefs about biblical authorship. Sincere Christians are naturally baffled by all this. They reason that if they can trust the computer for everything from simple data-storage to complex mathematical calculations involving billions of steps, then why should they not trust it when it gives out conclusions which question our faith. The question is reasonable, and we will try to analyze the whole matter in the next few paragraphs :

First of all we must understand ...
... that a computer is a non-living machine which can do only one thing --computations, or mathematical calculations. It can do this at an incredible speed and almost without mistake, but it is still not equipped with intelligence or independent reasoning power. It cannot even break a complex problem into simpler parts, which has to be done by the computer programmer. He takes the problem and writes it out in a form which involves only very simply mathematics and logic. He then feeds all of this to the computer in a special language (just a combination of logical operations), and then gives the data on which the calculation is to be performed. This means that whenever a problem has to be solved with a computer it has to be reduced to mathematical calculations. But if a given problem cannot be expressed in terms of mathematics and mathematical-logic, then it cannot be solved with the help of a computer. Here lies the root of all the problems.

If a person wants to determine whether Paul was the writer of the epistles bearing his name, is it possible to reduced this problem to mathematics ? NO, it is just not possible to determine the authorship of any books with the help of mathematical equations. The problem is too complex for mathematics. As a consequence, the men working on Paul chose the "style of writing" as a possible criterion to determine whether Paul had indeed written those epistles. But, style is a very complex property of language. It is just not possible to reduce it to accurate mathematics. But they had to find out some method
to analyze style and therefore they arbitrarily chose the frequency with which the Greek word KAI was used in these writings as the criterion of style. Then they analyzed the epistles of Paul on this basis and concluded that only four of them were really written by Paul. But is this what the computer had shown to them ? The answer is a definite NO !

What the computer had done was to mathematically analyze the frequency with which the Greek word KAI was used in these letters. The analysis indicated that the frequency was similar only in four of the epistles. It did not indicate anything else. The rest was unsupported human interpretation along the following lines : the frequency of using the word KAI is similar in four letters. Therefore the style of these four letters is similar. Since the computer analyst has already decided (without any logical reason) that one of these letter was written by Paul, all the four having the same kai frequency are written by Paul. By inference, the rest of the letters are not written by Paul. Any person who has ever studied logic or the philosophy and methodology of science in any depth will laugh at the way these conclusions were arrived at. This is not the method of serious scientific research.

The first fallacy in the above analysis is the use of a single word to determine style. Analysts of language will testify that language is so complex a phenomena that it is impossible to analyze style this easily. Style depends not only on the frequency of word usage, but also on numerous other factors including grammar, vocabulary, word-order, the mood of the construction, and many unseen factors. It is not a sign of serious scholarship to consider a single word, without considering all the other visible and invisible factors, as the deciding factor in style-analysis.

The second problem with style-analysis is that it is not a fixed characteristic of a particular language or of a person. Even though some broad trends of style can be discerned in every language and person, the actual style varies from subject to subject even in the writings of a single person. He may vary it consciously or unconsciously due to the nature of subject matter, the object of his communication, or even due to the limitations of the listener. Since style is such a flexible property of language, it is not at all justified to use it to determine authorship.

Third, whenever a new method of testing something is developed by scientists, it is always calibrated. Calibration means, checking and comparing its results with something that is already known. In the present case this means that they should have performed this analysis on ancient and modern writings about which we have fully reliable information. This would have given us information about the reliability of this method of analysis, and also given us the limitations of this type of work (because every type of scientific test has its own limitations).

No calibration or standardization was done before this test was applied to the Bible. This itself speaks volumes about the attitude of the men who did the analysis. It was not surprising for others when they discovered contradictions very soon. For example, when some people applied this test to the book written by the very man who had challenged the authorship of Paul, it showed that the book was written by more than one author !! The same test was performed on many other known documents, and in almost every case it gave erroneous result. If anyone still maintains that the computer tests performed on the Pauline epistles are authentic, this is due to ignorance or due to bias.

The original work on the basis of KAI frequency was modified by many persons. Some of them took into consideration as many as twenty different words to analyze style. This sure looks impressive, but the results are still inconclusive because style-analysis has not been standardized yet. It is still a very difficult problem, and computer programmers and linguists do not yet have enough mathematical tools to express style truly in the form of mathematical equation.

It is audacious to claim that we can confirm or refute the accepted authorship of the books in the Bible with the help of computer analysis. The methods of style analysis are only in infancy. It may take a long time before our methods of language-analysis give any certainty even in simple matters let alone in matters of authorship. Presently, a good number of the computer scientists, theorists, and philosophers of science believe that man will never reach a state when he would be able to make such pronouncements with absolute certainty.

Since this is the real state of affairs one should not be disturbed by all the hasty statements about the computer analysis of the Bible, whether in support or in refutation of the accepted views. The hasty and unrestrained conclusions circulated in press from time time against the Bible reflects more about the analyst and much less about the text of the Bible.
Dr. Philip is the founder of Free Courses, a distance program. He also has Free Apologetics Courses where numerous free courses are available.