Kairopractice

St. Paul has always been thought to be one man who did not put off writing letters; 14 of the New Testament's 21 Epistles are attributed to him. Now a canny Scots minister from the town of Culross claims to have scientific evidence that Paul wrote only four of the letters that bear his name--Romans, I and II Corinthians, and Galatians.

The Rev. Andrew Morton, who will publish his findings next month in a volume of New Testament studies, got his evidence from an electronic computer operated by the University of London. Until now, Morton argues, scholars could only question Paul's authorship on the basis of their personal, subjective analysis of the literary style of the Epistles, and "evidence" that convinced one scholar often left another unimpressed. Investigator Morton decided to use statistics instead of intuition.

On the theory that every writer has certain subconscious, invariable writing habits. Morton had Dr. Michael Levison of Birkbeck College program the London computer to check the frequency and use of kai, a common Greek word meaning and, also, even, etc., in sentences drawn from nine classical writers--including Plato and Plutarch--found that each had a clear and distinct pattern in the way he handled his kais.

To test his hypothesis on the Epistles, Morton started with the assumption that Paul was indeed the author of Galatians (an attribution no scholar questions), fed every sentence in the Epistles to the computer for kai counting. Morton's conclusion: "There are four Epistles which were written by a man whose vocabulary had a constant proportion of kais in it, who used his kais in a consistent pattern and who, by definition, must be the Apostle Paul. The other ten Epistles exhibit diverse characteristics and must have come from at least three other hands."

Morton believes his discovery to be a hard blow against all kinds of Fundamentalists, who take the Bible literally. "This is one in the eye for all the Bible thumpers," he says. But he argues that his study "in no way detracts from the Epistles' value as church scripture," since the churches have always accepted them, regardless of authorship, as accurate reflections of Pauline teaching.

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