Comparing two distribution models of Paul's literary techniques : Poisson versus negative binomial
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Abstract
This article explores how literary features are statistically distributed in the Christian apostle Paul’s letters. While several decades of occasional research have applied statistics to Paul’s letters, most if not all previous such approaches have either assumed that Paul’s language follows a normal distribution or ignored the question of statistical distribution entirely. The nature of feature distribution—be the features vocabulary words or second-order features chosen by the analyst—is a crucial component of any statistical analysis, and the dearth of work in this area therefore forms a major hole in mathematical approaches to Paul’s letters. This paper addresses this hole in scholarship by comparing two possible models for Paul’s various literary techniques: the Poisson distribution versus the negative binomial distribution.
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DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : The original data presented in the study are openly available in Robertson, Paul. 2016, Paul’s Letters and Contemporary Greco-Roman Literature: Theorizing a New Taxonomy. Leiden: Brill.
This article belongs to the Special Issue Computational Approaches to Ancient Jewish and Christian Texts.
This article belongs to the Special Issue Computational Approaches to Ancient Jewish and Christian Texts.
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Paul’s letters, Statistics and computation, Distributions
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Citation
McCauley, Thomas, and Paul Robertson. 2025. Comparing Two Distribution Models of Paul’s Literary Techniques: Poisson Versus Negative Binomial. Religions 16: 564. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16050564.