A second reason scholars dismiss
Paul’s Pastoral Epistles as pseudepigraphical is because the vocabulary has
been reported to be markedly different from his other correspondences in the
canon. One scholar, writing in a time when character-based analysis of text was
unavailable, reports that the Pastoral Epistles consist of 848 words (not
including proper names), 306 of which do not occur in any other of the Pauline
epistles that are considered authentic. Thus, over 36 percent of the Pastoral’s
vocabulary is unique, throwing their authenticity into doubt (Harrison, The
Problem of the Pastoral Epistles, 21). However, my own character-based
computer analysis of these numbers results in 956 distinct words in the
Pastorals, 573 of which do not occur in any other Pauline epistle. This brings
Paul’s overall vocabulary to 5,671 words, of which the distinct 573 words in
the Pastorals come to about 10 perfect, less than one third of the earlier
scholar’s estimate. (These numbers were arrived at by downloading the Greek
text for each Pauline epistle from greekbible.com, collating these words into a
document from which all duplicates were removed, and then loading the results
into a relational database, from which queries were run to find all words that
exist in the Pastoral epistles that are not otherwise present in the authentic
or deutero-Pauline epistles. Proper names and numeric words were also removed.)
Ten percent may appear substantial at first glance, but let us compare it to
Brother Joseph’s canonical writings. In the first dozen years, his vocabulary
comes to 2,864 words. But during the last several years of his writings, which
contain his more literary compositions, his vocabulary falls to 2,167 words,
831 of which were not used in the first dozen years: 38 percent. The same
approach was used here as was used in the Pauline text analysis. The
revelations from 1820 to 1832 comprise the first dataset, while those from 1838
to 1844 comprise the second dataset.) Clearly, the evolution of an author’s
published vocabulary from one period of life to another is not indicative of a
change in authorship. (Gregory McHardy, 8 Myths of the Great Apostasy [Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 2022], 60-61 n. 10)
