Britt’s and Wingo’s finale is lackluster. After having built their arguments on extremely faulty ground, they begin their finale by saying that “this section will contain some of our most revealing finds and help us date a number of early Christian text.” They won’t fulfill those claims.
They begin off by reviewing some of the dates they argued for in chapter 5. I won’t go into depth on those now, as we will explore them fully when we get to chapter 5, but suffice it to say at this time, their dating simply isn’t supported by the evidence. Their arguments for dating are generally fueled more by their conclusion rather than any data.
Ignoring their dating scheme will have little impact here anyway as stylometry is not used to determine the dates of texts.
The main argument that Britt and Wingo go to anyway is based on Revelation 1 and Revelation 2-3 being written by different authors. I think it should be clear by now that such arguments are invalid. This time though, it’s not just because the methodology invalidates their analysis, but as we saw above, their entire argument about Revelation isn’t supported by the data.
With that, we can move on to 1 Clement.
1 Clement
One of the favorite arguments of Britt and Wingo is the vague claim that “some scholars” say or point to something. Who these scholars are isn’t mentioned. As we’ve seen before, often the claims these unnamed scholars posit are fringe ideas, straight conspiracies, or contradictory.
In this case, the “some scholars” claim is that 1 Clement “seems to actually have been more of a work continuously added to rather than a single, whole letter (and given its length it is arguably more of a treatise or even book-sized for its time period).” We will get to the second part of the claim in due time.
But first, what about the idea that 1 Clement is a work that was continuously added to?
I can’t find such a theory. I searched for ideas that 1 Clement contained interpolations, that it was a composite letter, that there were multiple authors. I tried to find any scholar who really broke into any territory that suggested 1 Clement wasn’t a singular letter. I even widened the search to include potential conspiracy theories, or fringe views by non-scholars that were anywhere in this realm. I found nothing.
That’s not to say they definitely don’t exist. I could be missing something myself. What it does show is that one, if Britt and Wingo can’t mention the supposed scholars, then there probably is no reason to take them seriously as the reader shouldn’t have to do the authors’ homework. And two, if the view they claim is held exists, then it’s a rather fringe theory that simply isn’t bothered with in virtually all of the literature.
So what do we know about the composition of 1 Clement then? The Loeb Classical Library text, “The Apostolic Fathers: Volume 1,” edited and translated by Bart Ehrman, gives the standard overview of 1 Clement.
Now, it is true that 1 Clement is a long letter. As Ehrman points out, there have been different scholarly views as to why. Some have suggested that the author of the text forgot what their original intention was, until the end of the text. Others think that it was all intentional, in order to make a larger point. What we don’t see though is a suggestion that it’s a composite letter.
In fact, Ehrman specifically states that “it is clear that even though the letter claims to have been written by ‘the church’ of Rome, it must have been composed by a single author.” While we don’t know who this author is, as the letter never mentions the author by name, it’s clear that we are only looking at the writing of a singular person.
Ehrman doesn’t explain why we can be certain of this, but also doesn’t seem to feel a need to defend such a position. As a single authorship is being questioned here though, it is probably prudent to dive a bit deeper.
Michael Holmes, in his book, “The Apostolic Fathers in English,” states that “the unity of style suggests that the letter is the work of a single author.” We also know that historically, from our earliest witness to this text, that it was deemed to be the work of one author. Now, there isn’t a whole lot written about this specific topic, but that’s because there just isn’t a debate. There’s nothing to suggest that the text was continuously added to.
But what of their second claim here, about the length of 1 Clement being more similar to a treatise or book? This is an argument that is often used against the Letter to the Romans as well, that it’s just too long to be a real letter. It’s an argument that doesn’t make sense to me though. So what if the letter is actually a treatise instead? How does that really affect anything?
Beyond that, the length doesn’t necessitate what genre or type of writing a text is. Britt and Wingo seem to be implying that there were some strict guidelines here or something along those lines, but there weren’t.
While it is true there were different types of letters, and some generic structures, Bronwen Neil, in her article, “Letter-collecting from Cicero to late antiquity,” shows that writers didn’t necessarily follow such, “but rather adapted those structures to suit their occasional purpose.”
More so, Neil points out that there isn’t a single accepted definition of what a letter was in either classical or late antiquity. Instead, we can look at it more like “a communication with somebody absent as if he or she were present; it is a speech written down.”
To further complicate matters, when we look at ancient epistolary theorists, we see that there were dozens of supposed types of letters. Pseudo-Demetrius lists 21 times, while Pseudo-Libanius has 41 types. As Neil shows, this indicates that when it came to letter-writing, the genre itself, there was a great amount of flexibility, “and that it could be used at will for various purposes of communication.”
We also begin to see a hybridization of genres occurring, where this flexibility continued to grow. Neil notes that the crossover between letter to treatise was frequently made. Within early Christian literature, we see a crossover into the realm of homilies and theological treatises. These were still letters in a technical sense, but we also see the genre being rather flexible.
That 1 Clement is thus rather long isn’t completely surprising, nor is it out of what was considered to be in the genre of letter writing. The length in no way suggests that it is a composite text, or something that was continually added to.
1 Clement Methodology
So that’s a lot to say in regards to just one sentence by Britt and Wingo, but establishing further the faulty ground that they are standing on is important. With them continually building on these unsupported ideas, it leads to some serious questions.
Based on their view that 1 Clement is a composite text, they are able to then confirm that regardless of how they split it up, it’s going to be a composite text. Again, we get that circular reasoning at play, but we also get a clear sign that there is something further wrong with the methodology that they have employed.
The authors tell us that because the individual chapters in 1 Clement are too short, they combined chapters until they hit the length they wanted. They specifically state that there was no logic behind this besides getting to a suitable length. This is a massive problem.
If we entertain the assumption that 1 Clement is a composite text, simply taking chapters at random and running them through Stylo will not verify that sections are in fact written by either distinct authors, or the same author. Let’s break this down.
Britt and Wingo ran 1 Clement 1-9 as a single text. There was no logic behind this besides text length. Meaning, they didn’t examine the chapters to see if they could locate potential breaks, or different authors. They didn’t divide it in any manner along potential authors.
Potentially then, if we assume multiple authors and a text that was continuously added to, we could have a situation where chapters 1-5 are one author, and chapters 6-9 are a second author. Yet that wouldn’t show up in any stylometric analysis. It would also mean that one author was being hidden or overpowered by the style of the second.
We can build further on this. Britt and Wingo lump 1 Clement 1-9, 60-65, and the prologue together as being written by the same person. They also state that it’s possible that some portion of chapters 10-14 were also written by this same author, even though they show up far away in their results. But we could take this a step further and posit that in fact, portions of 1 Clement 15-39 and 40-59 are also by the same author, but that their style is masked by a second author in those groupings. This could, in turn, mean that the majority of 1 Clement is in fact by one author.
We can, once again, take it even a bit further here. If we recall back to the discussion on Mark, Britt and Wingo argued that chapter 16 was written by a different author. The issue though is that in their stylometric analysis, they included in chapter 16 the longer ending of Mark, which is accepted to have been written later. As I pointed out, according to their rationale, a smaller portion of a text could overpower the style of the longer portion, as it seemingly did in the case of Mark.
This could then mean that virtually everything was written by one author, but because of small interpolations, it skewed the final results of their analysis. Britt and Wingo can’t argue against this, because they had no true logic behind the divisions they made in the text. For them to say that any of this then gives clear results is ridiculous.
The fact that they even acknowledge that portions of chapters 10-14 could be by the same author as chapters 1-9, even though they don’t appear together in their results only screams to us that their results are largely worthless because they have no real methodology. If chapters 10-14 being disconnected allows one to then assign them to some other author based on a whim, how can we trust their readings?
Further, Britt and Wingo don’t explain what they mean by chapters 10-14 being disconnected from chapters 1-9. The implication, since they link at least portions of them to the same author, is that there is a different theme, topic, or the like that is being discussed in chapters 10-14. That something within those chapters changed the author’s style. This would largely invalidate their entire argument though.
Regardless of what this disconnect is, if it can change the author’s style enough to make these chapters appear completely separate from chapters 1-9, it means that their argument that authorial fingerprints are definite, and don’t change, is false. That one of their key concepts about stylometry is simply wrong. It just further invalidates their flawed methodology.
This is all the more confusing when they then mention that the borders of their results “are a bit fuzzy given our divisions are based on size of text and not pericope or theme in the text.” But why would this matter according to their set methodology? If, as they state, on page 211, “regardless of the topic Stylo correctly identifies the author. It doesn’t look at the theme, theology, opinion, topic, or anything like that,” why would theme now have an impact?
If their treatment of 1 Clement shows us anything, it’s that their methodology is flawed beyond repair.
Then after all of that, Britt and Wingo attempt to erase Clement from history, by claiming he’s just a made-up mouthpiece. Their evidence? Other works were later attributed to Clement, but according to their analysis, none show up with 1 Clement. Thus, they are all fake letters.
This makes no logical sense. Just because later texts were forged in a certain name, it doesn’t mean they are all forged, or that the individual didn’t exist. Why would it? Such a conclusion ignores the reason why letters were even forged to begin with. It was to give a work additional authority.
But there is a bigger problem here. 1 Clement never claims to have been written by Clement. This is a latter attribution. This is what later writers would claim when trying to assign an author to the letter.
Even if we assume that Clement is a fictional character, it would have no bearing on this letter, which didn’t originally bear his name. The fact that later people attributed this letter to Clement doesn’t somehow magically make it a forgery. Their argument completely fails in this regard.
For Britt and Wingo though, this argument is important. The reason is because 1 Clement is our first reference to Paul. With 1 Clement generally dated in the mid-90s, this pushes Paul definitively into the first century, as opposed to the argument the authors make, which is that Paul is largely a second-century creation.
Epistle of Barnabas
Very little space is spent on the Epistle of Barnabas. Britt and Wingo make one of their favorite conclusions, that it’s a composite text, and that is basically it.
So what is their evidence that this is a composite? It rests on their stylometric analysis, which we have no reason to trust, as it is clearly invalid. But in this case, it gets a bit worse. Because the argument they make is that the text isn’t pieced together over time, but that the author lifted material from another author and added it to their own work.
In essence then, we have one overall author who incorporated the text of another author. To call this a composite is rather a stretch. After all, no one would consider the present work a composite, but I’ve incorporated the work of many other authors. In my case, I’ve cited my sources, but that wasn’t really the case when it comes to ancient texts, as we’ve discussed above.
As above, we also see the issue of splitting a work based on wanting to fulfill a certain length. There is no logic behind this, and as shown above, it makes any result exceptionally questionable as the division is arbitrary.
With Barnabas specifically, that a division is found is not surprising. In The Loeb Classical Library text, “The Apostolic Fathers: Volume 2,” edited and translated by Ehrman, it’s argued that Barnabas is in fact divided into two parts. But the division is between chapters 1-17 and 18-21. The first portion is composed of “a series of arguments designed to reveal the truths that pertain to salvation and to who, at the same time, that the Jews’ (false) religion is rooted in their misunderstanding of their own scripture.”
The second part, as similar to the Didache, presents a version of the “two paths” teaching.
That the arbitrary division that Britt and Wingo created happens to demonstrate this isn’t surprising. Yet, even their division excludes two chapters from where this clear division lies. And opposed to their rationale, that this division signifies two authors, what we instead see is that the division is based on theme.
However, we do find Britt and Wingo getting close to at least one idea. Their claim that the latter part of the text incorporates the work of another author isn’t far off. But opposed to their view, what we see is the author of Barnabas deriving their teaching from another source.
As mentioned above, the second part of Barnabas shares a parallel teaching to Didache. But according to Ehrman, the general consensus is that both Barnabas and Didache took their teachings from a common source. To make the claim that this means there was a second author is irrational.
Hebrews
Hebrews gets an even briefer treatment than Barnabas did. But in just half a dozen sentences, they are able to get a good deal wrong. What may be most interesting though is that they ran Hebrews as a singular work.
Why they did such is not explained. We can be certain it’s not because it’s too short. The chapters themselves aren’t even too short based on their criteria. Even if they thought some were getting on the shorter size, they could have combined chapters as they did elsewhere.
The issue here really is that they are simply ignoring their own methodology with no explanation. Making exceptions like this not only taints any results they have, but also begs the question, are they just making things up.
This brings us to their first claim, that Hebrews is an anonymous letter written in the style of Paul. While it is true that the Epistle to the Hebrews is anonymous, there is no claim in it about its authorship, and it is not written in the style of Paul.
While Hebrews would eventually be attributed to Paul, the early church fathers would also argue that it differed in both style and theology from Paul’s own letters. Clement, Tertullian, and Origen all acknowledged this difference.
For Clement, the argument was that Luke had translated Paul’s Hebrew original into Greek, which explained some of the issues. Origen would instead argue that it was a student of Paul who wrote the letter. Either way, that it differed in style from Paul’s actual works has long been noted.
This is an interesting mistake to make by Britt and Wingo. They had argued previously that a literary school could produce similar styles, and in fact, part of their argument in regards to the authorship of the Pauline texts relied on this. So, if the author of Hebrews was intentionally trying to copy the style of Paul, wouldn’t we expect it to show up near the other Pauline texts?
Instead, the results of their own analysis would suggest that Hebrews was written in a different style. One has to wonder if they even took into consideration their own results. This wouldn’t be the only time I’ve pointed such out.
In fact, I have to point it out again in this very section. Britt and Wingo make the argument that Hebrews is associated with or close to Justin Martyr and Tatian. They don’t confirm either being the author of Hebrews, but they say that it’s possible. Their results don’t support such a conclusion though.
When we look at their dendrogram, we see Hebrews, while in a general cluster with Justin and Tatian, is still on its own branch. Tatian, of the two possible authors, is the furthest away, on a completely different branch. The distance between Tatian and Hebrews largely rules out a common author.
Hebrews is a bit closer to two of the works of Justin, but again, they are still quite distant from each other. We can’t say how distant the two are, as again, we don’t actually have the scale to determine such, but they aren’t close enough to rule common authorship.
Going beyond this, their argument that their results show that it was associated with the church in Rome around the time of Justin and Tatian simply is out of the realm of what stylometry does. It’s these sorts of arguments that make it difficult to believe they have a full understanding of stylometry. Instead, it almost feels like they just latched on to it because it seems scientific.
But even considering the line of reasoning they have, if Hebrews was written in the style of Paul, one could make an argument that that is why it is associated with the church in Rome. After all, Paul had some connection to that church. So there is no need to suggest a connection with Justin or Tatian.
The final argument they make gives the feeling that they are just throwing spaghetti against a wall and seeing what sticks. They state that “Hebrews has extensive references to the Hebrew Bible, and both Justin and Tatian were adept at doing the same.”
Referencing the Hebrew Bible isn’t unique to either Hebrews, Justin, or Tatian though. We discussed previously how Revelation has hundreds of references to the Old Testament. Hebrews does have a lot of references, around 86, but the Gospel of Matthew surpasses it with 96. Three other books have over 50 references. Another 8 hit double digits.
If we look at the church fathers and their use of the Old Testament, it’s 1 Clement that stands out. As James DeYoung points out in “1 Clement: A Model for Christian Hermeneutics and Eschatology?” “Clement stats unique in his frequent and extensive use of the Old Testament. No other Father cites or alludes to Scripture as frequently as 1 Clement does.”
Donald Alfred Hagner, in “The Use of the Old and New Testaments in Clement of Rome,” points out that Barnabas uses the Old Testament in a similar rate to Clement. We can also look at Tertullian, who in “Against Marcion,” defended Christian use of the Old Testament, and demonstrated how it could be used to refute heresies.
The idea that we can connect Hebrews with Justin and Tatian because they both use the Old Testament a lot just shows an unfamiliarity with the material.