Luke is confirmed as author of both gospel and Acts books
Is Luke the Author of a Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles?
Computation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceDigital Libraries
Summary
There has been debate about whether Luke wrote both a Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles because his name is not directly on these texts. Some scholars think there was one author, others think two different ones wrote them. The authors used computer-based methods to analyze writing style and vocabulary frequency in both books. Their analysis strongly supports that the same person, likely Luke, wrote both.
What this means in practice
- •For digital humanities teams: Use computational authorship tools to verify historical document authorship, applying the methodology shown for ancient texts.
- •For text analytics developers: Incorporate new feature sizes and stylistic metrics from this study to improve author verification in multi-text corpora.
Authors
Jacques Savoy
Abstract
According to Christian tradition, Luke is credited with authoring a Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, even if his name does not appear in either book, both originally written in Koine Greek. Several biblical scholars assume that both texts were written by a common author, while others deduce the presence of two authors. Different studies have been found to support either finding, some based on qualitative evaluation, while a few others consider the occurrence frequency differences between the two books. To propose an enhanced quantitative analysis, this study is grounded on two recent authorship attribution models. The Burrows' Delta, applied with eleven different feature sizes, demonstrates common authorship. An author verification model confirms this finding. The following experiments consider several stylistic representations, feature sizes, and distance functions to confirm that Luke is the true author of both books.