Comparing two distribution models of Paul's literary techniques : Poisson versus negative binomial

dc.contributor.authorMcCauley, Thomas
dc.contributor.authorRobertson, Paul
dc.date.accessioned2025-07-03T06:00:25Z
dc.date.available2025-07-03T06:00:25Z
dc.date.issued2025-04
dc.descriptionDATA 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.
dc.descriptionThis article belongs to the Special Issue Computational Approaches to Ancient Jewish and Christian Texts.
dc.description.abstractThis 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.
dc.description.departmentNew Testament Studies
dc.description.librarianhj2025
dc.description.sdgNone
dc.description.urihttps://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions
dc.identifier.citationMcCauley, 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.
dc.identifier.issn2077-1444 (online)
dc.identifier.other10.3390/rel16050564
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2263/103136
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherMDPI
dc.rights© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
dc.subjectPaul’s letters
dc.subjectStatistics and computation
dc.subjectDistributions
dc.titleComparing two distribution models of Paul's literary techniques : Poisson versus negative binomial
dc.typeArticle

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