Those who have read "Be Ye Hackers," "Edit, Audit, Prophet," or "Truth, Rhetoric, and Generative Artificial Intelligence" should not be surprised that I can find ways to use examples from information technology in sermons. But this particular occurrence kind of ran the other way, and came back to me at various points during my career.
This was a result of taking another religious studies course. In this particular case, it was about higher Biblical criticism. This is the type of analysis of Biblical text that goes beyond simply looking at all the scraps and fragments of a particular passage or book, and doing the translations. This has to do with looking at the text, and the style of writing in different places, to see if the same author wrote all of a book that is attributed to him, or if a section of text is unattributed, but can be linked to other writings in the Bible, and so give an indication of who the author was. There is a subset of higher criticism known as redaction criticism, or (essentially) editing criticism. This is analysis of how different writings might have been put together in order to form what we now see as a single book.
As usual, being from the sciences, I had little experience in what was expected in an Arts course. However, wanting to get into things as quickly as possible, I volunteered to be one of the first to do a project, and then to present it to the class. The professor suggested that an appropriate topic might be the role and status of women in Paul's epistles.
As I said, this material came back to me, in odd ways, at odd times, during my career. First, there was the malware research. Many people in the field were not simply building protections against computer viruses and other malware, but were trying to analyze the code of the malware in order to identify authors. This was, initially, known as forensic programming. These days few researchers are identifying individual programmers, but, more commonly, are identifying families of malware. Malware production in the current environment is usually done by a group, acting in a sense as a company. It is part of organized crime, and is, therefore, somewhat organized. Those who study the field, and the malware as it appears, can identify groups producing the malware, and trace lineages, in terms of development of the software, as functionality is added for particular purposes. It is also often possible to tell when a particular example from a malware family has been taken and modified by a group external to the original malware development group. This tends to result in a very branching family tree, as different stages of a particular malware family are hived off by various external groups.
When teaching legal aspects of information security, I would often mention the ability to determine evidence from written communications, such as spam, which gave information about perpetrators, through a field called forensic linguistics.
Eventually I used both the ideas from forensic programming, and those from forensic linguistics and stylistic forensics, in preparing the book called "Software Forensics." Interestingly, Gloria, in her experience as a secretary, and in one of the more mundane tasks of a secretary (that of typing up letters and documents prepared by other people) gave me additional examples of stylistic forensics. She was able, in typing up my own work, to determine that I had two completely distinctive styles of writing, with different stylistic and forensic metrics, depending upon which audience I was talking to or writing for.
However, back to Paul's letters. I had to do most of the study on my own, since I was doing the project that would be presented first. I therefore had to read the textbook by myself. And I can still recall my annoyance at the fact that the church had completely failed to mention something which, when pointed out in the text book, was completely and glaringly obvious.
As Christians, most of us believe in the Bible as inerrant. That is, that the Bible is the word of God, and is the ultimate standard for judging any additional revelations, or suggestions, put forward by any new preacher or church. The Bible is the standard to judge any particular new theology.
But Christians are a little bit sloppy about defining inerrant. There is the idea that the Bible is the standard by which to judge any proposed theology. But there are also those who say that the Bible contains absolutely no errors at all, and who go to great lengths, sometimes contorting themselves and their logic into pretzel-like forms, in order to explain differences in a story as recounted in one part of the Bible, but then told gain in another part of the Bible, with slightly different wording. And sometimes even slightly different *facts*. To provide only one example, there are the four different accounts of Jesus' resurrection in the four Gospels. Who saw Jesus first, who was there at the time, who ran and told who, etc.
That becomes really problematic when you get different texts of the same book, and the same passage, which have slightly different wording. And there are those for whom this insistence on absolute, literal, inerrancy is the *definition* of inerrancy. The Bible was dictated by God, whoever wrote it down, and the text in the original Hebrew or Greek is inerrant, and the translation into Latin is inerrant, and the later translations into English and other vulgar languages is also inerrant, as is the retranslation into more current forms of English, as English, itself, develops. (Hey, if the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.)
Which flies in the face of the evidence that is presented to us when we actually start looking at the text. The tools that we use in forensic linguistics and stylistic forensics can be used in examining the Bible, and higher biblical criticism probably drove the origins of stylistic forensics and forensic linguistics. If you look at at the Biblical text in this light, you can see that a book attributed to a single author contains writings that have different styles, and presents different metrics when examined with the tools used in forensic linguistics. This is not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle to believing that a single author wrote a particular book. As I said, Gloria was able to identify that I had at least two distinct different writing styles, myself. But, it does present us with some very interesting analysis when we look closely and see that these stylistic and metrical distinctions match up precisely with sections of text which are problematic in terms of content and concept.
There is, for example, the Apostle Paul. At one point he very strongly states that in Christ there is no male or female. There is no distinction to be made on the basis of a great number of characteristics which we, in our human society, feel are very important. Gender seems to be one of them. But then again, in other places in letters attributed to Paul, there are very socially conservative statements about what women can be allowed to do. So how do we address these contradictions?
Well, those who have done higher textual criticism in the New Testament note that the passages relegating women to subordinate rules, and stating that there are things which women are not allowed to do, are in styles, and have metrics, that are different from those of the bulk of Paul's writing. It is, therefore, reasonable to propose that these particular sections might not have been written by Paul, but might have been added by later editors or copyists. This is the research that I was doing for my project, but there are a number of other, similar, topics and subjects which tend to result in similar suggestions.
Of course, for those who insist on an absolutely inerrant definition of inerrancy, this is a bit of a problem. They tend to address that problem by rejecting the entire field of higher criticism.
Well, I read the textbook, and I did the research, and I presented my findings to the class. I managed to get a passing mark in the course.
In addition to the links to my later career, there was one additional follow-up to this story. The following year, at I was a counselor at a summer camp. At one particular meal, I found myself seated at a table with the wife of the minister who was speaking during that camp. She noted that in their women's Bible study they had been studying Paul's letters, with particular attention to the role of women. I mentioned that I had done a paper the previous year, on just this topic. She was absolutely delighted, and asked me what I had found in my study. So, I told her that I had found that the more conservative directives about women tended to be found in those parts of Paul's letters about which the authorship was debated.
She recoiled in absolute horror! I should have remembered that it was highly likely, in this particular denomination, that most of the pastors wives would probably never have even heard of higher textual criticism, and would have been very firmly on the inerrant side of inerrancy.
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
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