During Bible study last week, it was mentioned that people have used statistics to “determine” authorship of books of the Bible. Having a couple free hours last night, I tried my own experiment on the New Testament. The procedure was easy: I downloaded the Nestle-Aland 26th edition of the New Testament; each book in the […]

On a recent plane trip, I was reading a very abridged version of (the ten thousand page long!) Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth, and I found something totally beautiful. Believing God to be entirely “transcendent in contrast to all immanence” and “divine in contrast to everything human,” and reading (e.g., in Philippians 2:7) that Jesus is […]

Given a text in two languages, is it possible to uncover the meaning of individual words? The Bible is a particularly easy text to work with, since corresponding sentences are marked (i.e., with the same chapter and verse numbers). I downloaded a copy of the Hebrew Bible and the King James’ Version, and looked at […]

Someone contacted me with some questions about Bayesian document clustering; with that inspiration and a free afternoon a few weeks ago, I took a Hebrew bible and built a matrix where equals the frequency of the -th (Hebrew!) word in the -th chapter of Genesis. I calculated its singular value decomposition (supposedly […]