Who really wrote the Bible?
Posted by Todd Rhoades in Current Events on Nov 2nd, 2011 | 4 commentsPrecisely who wrote the Bible has been debated for centuries – but now scientists have devised a computer program that sheds much more light on the sources of the various religious texts within it.
Israeli computer scientists and Bible scholars have written an algorithm that analyses the writing styles found within various sections.
While it can’t pinpoint an individual author, the program has been able to determine when a passage has been written by more than one person and can detect the point at which a new author has taken over.
The computer program will be able to help with these kinds of debates by processing how functional words and synonyms are used within various passages, which can reveal whether different people were involved in producing the material.
The researchers, led by Professor Nachum Dershowitz of Tel Aviv University’s Blavatnik School of Computer Science, tested their software by feeding it mixed up passages from two Hebrew books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel – and asking the computer to re-sort them.
It did so with 99 per cent accuracy, by looking at how various words were distributed.
Presented at the 49th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, the research was hailed as a way of side-stepping a traditional problem in Bible analysis – the fact that many scholars are inherently subjective about how they view its text.
via Mail Online.
Hmmm… actually, this is pretty cool if it’s accurate. Thoughts?
Todd
4 Responses to “ “Who really wrote the Bible?”
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Interesting. I’m a bit skeptical of it, to be honest. It’s one thing to sort out passages from two different books of the Bible, when the content is quite distinct. It’s another thing to take passages from Isaiah, for example, with similar content, and sort them on the basis of synonyms and functional words. I’d be interested to see how the program works if they take a modern piece that has been co-authored and try to sort out who wrote which parts of the book. For example, some co-workers of mine and I are writing a series of Bible studies together. Could this program accurately sort out which paragraphs were written by which person? If so, then I’d trust it more readily.
If this program is used to argue for JEDP theory in Pentateuch, for example, I’d question its accuracy.
What if it proves that 2 Peter wasn’t written by Peter? :-0
With technology like this, “proved” probably isn’t a word that they would be able to use. It might suggest an author but it will hardly be able to prove much of anything. It would be interesting to see the results. I am always hesitant to fully rely on brand new technology, especially with such grand claims of accuracy without an external verification. Maybe taking an ancient text that we know has more than one author and differentiating between authors.
Well, what if I write a letter today, and another in 5 years… what if my style of writing has changed? What if my words are memorized and passed on and THEN written down?
Seriously, this will not “prove” anything, but it is pretty fascinating, nonetheless.