Clement of Alexandria -- A Basic Stylometric Study

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Tenorikuma
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Re: Clement of Alexandria -- A Basic Stylometric Study

Post by Tenorikuma »

Thanks for the detailed explanation.
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rakovsky
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Re: Clement of Alexandria -- A Basic Stylometric Study

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Peter Kirby wrote: Mon Jun 01, 2015 2:57 pm The so-called 'Letter to Theodore' could neither be authenticated nor disproven as authentic. As shown from the small frequencies of the 'words' measured, it is very difficult to use Clement's habits of style to identify a text only 749 words long. This is even though I didn't cull out the incipit and the long quote of the 'secret gospel.' (If using a 'z-scored p-value < 0.1' test, only 10 of 32 candidates are excluded. If using a 'z-scored p-value < 0.05' test, only 3 of 32 candidates are excluded.)

With this method, at least, there is a huge difference between a 750-word sample and a 3000-word sample. The most that can be said is that this doesn't disprove Clementine authorship of the 'Letter to Theodore'. It's possible that more-advanced stylometric techniques could provide useful information. Some studies have had good results with English texts of 250 words.
Sure, I can see that a smaller word sample makes it alot harder to successfully test and define a text's authenticity using word frequency. Still, I think that even with a small word sample, one could get an idea if it's authentic or not. That is, the words used could be more common with Clement than not and one could see if it resembles Clement's style, even if it's not as clear due to sample size.

But isn't there another problem in that Morton Smith had a compendium of Clement's phrases and vocabulary, made in the 1930's, and he even made marginal notes in it? So if someone found that the vocabulary in the Mar Saba letter matched what we knew from Clement, this would still not prove it authentic, even with a big sample size, eg. 5000 words, because the forger already had the same list of words and phrases as the tester would, and the forger was intentionally trying to mimic Clement's style?

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Peter Kirby
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Re: Clement of Alexandria -- A Basic Stylometric Study

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rakovsky wrote: Sat Jan 12, 2019 4:19 pm a compendium of ... phrases and vocabulary ... the vocabulary ... matched ... this would still not prove it authentic, even with a big sample size ... the forger already had the same list of words and phrases
Assuming also, by the structure of this argument:

(a) 20th century authorship [or other forger-friendly conditions] isn't discredited on other grounds.
(b) The means of testing style and forging style match (e.g., for both it's about frequency of words and phrases).
(c) The forger has both the ability to match the style and the ability to avoid leaving other clues of forgery.

Understanding what goes into forgery and detecting literary forgery is a woefully underdeveloped field. People seem to feel that there are common sense answers to this and that forgers are essentially undetectable. What you can say to that is 'maybe, maybe not.' Perhaps the field can be developed further to clarify this 'maybe, maybe not.'

Since what I said is that the "so-called 'Letter to Theodore' could neither be authenticated nor disproven as authentic" (or at least I don't know a way that it could be), and since I'm also not really making claims about the field of authorship detection at the moment, I guess that's all I have to say about that for now.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: Clement of Alexandria -- A Basic Stylometric Study

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Peter,
I respect your views and your collection of brief information on so many works on the Early Christian Writings website!
It's hard to find a source that tries to make a full list of all the writings on Christianity from the 1st to 3rd centuries. So you have a special resource.

This makes me take a hard look at Secret Mark. After reading alot about it, it looks to me like it's a forgery. I guess the main reason is the combination of how unlikely his discovery would be. The more that unlikely coincidences build up, the less likely that something occurred by that means. It's not a full disproof, it just makes M.Smith's claim very unlikely in my eyes.

To give an example out of many, he had already written articles in the 1940's to 50's on the debates over Clement's possible alleged instructions to lie for the faith, on homosexuality and Christianity, on Clement and the mystery rites, on the mystery of the kingdom of God, and on secret initiation rituals and teachings. Sure, M. Smith's apologists will argue back that M.Smith didn't focus much on these topics and that they are normal topics for an academic to cover. But for me, it just fits too smoothly - his research interests and his find.

If that was the only issue, I could overlook it, but there's alot of others, like how elements in the discovery's own story lines up with Mystery of Mar Saba and the book Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

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Re: Clement of Alexandria -- A Basic Stylometric Study

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rakovsky wrote: Sat Jan 12, 2019 8:27 pm Peter,
I respect your views and your collection of brief information on so many works on the Early Christian Writings website!
It's hard to find a source that tries to make a full list of all the writings on Christianity from the 1st to 3rd centuries. So you have a special resource.

This makes me take a hard look at Secret Mark. After reading alot about it, it looks to me like it's a forgery. I guess the main reason is the combination of how unlikely his discovery would be. The more that unlikely coincidences build up, the less likely that something occurred by that means. It's not a full disproof, it just makes M.Smith's claim very unlikely in my eyes.

To give an example out of many, he had already written articles in the 1940's to 50's on the debates over Clement's possible alleged instructions to lie for the faith, on homosexuality and Christianity, on Clement and the mystery rites, on the mystery of the kingdom of God, and on secret initiation rituals and teachings. Sure, M. Smith's apologists will argue back that M.Smith didn't focus much on these topics and that they are normal topics for an academic to cover. But for me, it just fits too smoothly - his research interests and his find.
If it had not coincided with his academic interests, Smith may never have taken note of it.
If that was the only issue, I could overlook it, but there's alot of others, like how elements in the discovery's own story lines up with Mystery of Mar Saba and the book Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.
The lengths that folks will go to to believe that the world revolves around "Evangelical Christianity." :think:

The "Shreds of Nicodemus" in Mystery of Mar Saba seems more like an expose, like a personal diary, than an apocryphal gospel about a divinely-transcendent inspired preacher. It was a fictional fake meant to destroy some specifically targeted essentials of Christian faith. Apples and oranges.

I'll confess that Anglo-Saxon Virtues was a new one for me. However, wasn't the fraud there the introduction of a phallic idol into an excavation of an ancient bishop's tomb, a half-joking wrench tossed into serious archeology to destroy specific person's reputation when it is to be revealed as a clever fake. This is not a secret gospel revealing Jesus was into extra-celestial sex. Oranges and pears.

If I were to propose a modern creator if this whimsical account of a libertine Jesus taking one starry-eyed devotee on a night of naked initiation, I'd think of a theosophist type, maybe G R S Mead, who was also an accredited scholar. This was just after the period when we saw the "dueling philologists" fight it out, with everyone (Tischendorff & Simonides) coming out with egg on their faces. The "seven veiled mystery" (from Gnosticism via Jewish mysticism) and the bizarre initiation rituals (from FreeMasonry, or at least Rosicrucian circles), were all hot topics in Mead's time, not so much in the late 30's to the early 1970s.

DCH
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Re: Clement of Alexandria -- A Basic Stylometric Study

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DCHindley wrote: Sun Jan 13, 2019 5:34 pm
If that was the only issue, I could overlook it, but there's alot of others, like how elements in the discovery's own story lines up with Mystery of Mar Saba and the book Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.
The lengths that folks will go to to believe that the world revolves around "Evangelical Christianity." :think:
Robert Price sees a connection between the two:
In the section subtitled “The Little Manuscript That Wasn’t There” Robert M. Price in addition to both Craig Evans and Dr Craig explains: “The Mystery of Mar “”Saba” by J.H. Hunter was issued in 1940 by Evangelical Publishers in New York and Canada and reprinted each of the next six years. Guess what happens in it? A delver in none other than the monastery of Mar Saba announces the discovery of an ancient document, the Shred of Nicodemus. It reads: “I, Nicodemus, in company with Joseph of Arimathea in the early morn of the first day of the week removed the body of Jesus. Coming forth we found the tomb opened and the stone rolled away after the earthquake. We left the linen clothes in the tomb, and carried Him forth lest profane hands desecrate His body. We buried Him in the sepulchre near the garden over the Kedron where standeth the pillar Absalom reared for himself in the King’s Dale.” As might be imagined, the announcement shocks the world, undermining faith in the resurrection. But it turns out that the Shred of Nicodemus is a hoax engineered by its “discoverer,” a hater of the Christian religion. Does any of this sound familiar?

No, the doubts stem from the elusive character of the original manuscript which Smith claimed he discovered written onto the end pages of a bound book in the library of the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem in 1958. Edgar J. Goodspeed had long ago warned that in the absence of supposed originals, one must always suspect any new gospel discovery claim (of which there have been very many) to be imposture. For instance, Nicolas Notovitch’s “Unknown Life of Jesus Christ”, allegedly based on an old Tibetan codex, foundered on such an embarrassment (Goodspeed, “Famous Biblical Hoaxes: Or, Modern Apocrypha”, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1956, p. 11).
https://oldschoolcontemporary.wordpress ... ton-smith/
If the problem was just coincidences between Morton's find and Mystery of Mar Saba and Anglo Saxon Attitudes, I wouldn't be as skeptical. But there are other problems like the way that "Secret Mark" lines up with his own particular views.

When it comes to investigating the document the first issue one must address is not really Evangelical Christianity's truth, or even Christianity's truth, but taking a careful examination of the work based on issues of archeology, provenance, etc., and including skepticism of authenticity in the review because it's newly discovered.

My research on the prophecies of the Messiah's resurrection: http://rakovskii.livejournal.com
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