Echoes of Scripture and the Jewish Pseudepigrapha in the Pastoral Epistles: Including a Method of Identifying High-interest Parallels

Abstract

Within Biblical studies, the term ‘echoes of Scripture’ is often used to describe a detailed study of verbal parallels (or potential references) between the New Testament and the Jewish Scriptures (i.e. Christian Old Testament). This present study expands upon this tradition by seeking to identify verbal parallels between the Pastoral Epistles and two different sets of source texts: the Septuagint and the Greek manuscripts of the Jewish Pseudepigrapha. The parallels are detected using a method that is analogous to the syntax analysis phase of a compiler or a natural language processor. As such, the study defines a set of syntax rules for textual references in Ancient Greek literature and then scans these rules to find instances when they are true (or satisfied). Based on the literary theory of allusions, the method relies upon the rarity of the matching words in order to highlight the most likely parallels for further evaluation as potential references. During this search process, the method also generates metadata that can be used to evaluate the relative influence of each set of source texts.