Richard Anderson (dokeo kago grapho soi kratistos theophilos) blogs briefly about stylometry and notes that he's got three volumes on the topic he's planning on reading through.

He also casually notes the bane of my existence: "Needless to say, stylometry now involves sophisticated math". I knew I should've paid more attention in my statistics class in college.

Anyway, here's my stylometry reading list at present. I have read most of these, others I am in the process of reading. If you have articles or books to suggest, please use the comments. I'll migrate them to the post to keep the post complete.

• Anthony Kenny, A Stylometric Study of the New Testament
• A. Dean Forbes, "Statistical Research on the Bible" in Anchor Bible Dictionary. This is well worth the effort to read and the bibliography for the article is quite helpful.
• Matthew Brook O'Donnell, Corpus Linguistics and the Greek of the New Testament
• Kenneth J. Neumann, The Authenticity of the Pauline Epistles in the Light of Stylostatistical Analysis
• Micheal W. Palmer, Levels of Constituent Structure in New Testament Greek (less about style, more about clause level syntax)
• P.N. Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles
• Stephen C. Carlson, A Cluster Analysis According to Lexical Contacts.

I'm also reading some discourse analysis stuff (Reed on Philippians, Guthrie on Hebrews, Van Neste on the Pastorals and some other stuff) in the hopes it'll spur some further thoughts. This is all background reading for the paper I'll be presenting at the SBL in November. Work is well under way, though digging into the math will be a bit of a challenge.

Update: Here are some brief thoughts on authorship of the Pastorals from my other (much less frequently posted-to) blog, PastoralEpistles.com. Please make sure to understand the gist of my point there — I think that NT authorship attribution studies that rely on unique vocabulary are inherently flawed, so in order to address the question we must throw those studies out and go back to the starting point. This means we first restate the internal evidence and argumentation for traditional authorship assumptions so skeptics can ask new questions about validity of authorship. Therefore we can start to examine questions of authorship again once the positive case is properly stated. The previous mode of argumentation was like this:

• Pauline Authorship: Yep, Paul wrote 'em. Says it right there in the salutation of each epistle.
• Skeptic: Hey, waitaminute! There's a lot of words in them thar epistles that don't occur anywhere else in Paul's letters. Maybe Paul didn't write them!
• Authorship Studies: Wow, you're right, Skeptic! We counted them all, and there really are a lot more (proportionately) in the Pastorals than in other Paulines. How could the same author have such a different vocabulary? You might be right! I mean, how else can we plausibly explain it?
• Commentators, etc.: Recent authorship studies show that the vocabulary of the Pastorals is much different than the vocabulary of other likely genuine Pauline epistles ...

So it becomes the accepted logic and can even be circular in nature as more studies are done citing commentators/etc. (and then new commentators cite the new studies ... ) as basis for hypotheses.

But other studies have been done recently and they've shown that one needs more data than the NT has available before vocabulary patterns can really establish anything regarding authorship (cf. O'Donnell's Corpus Linguistics and the Greek of the NT). Still more studies using differing criteria (more 'stylometric', so taking morphological data into account as well as vocabulary) show correlations close enough to not be unusual between some of the Pastorals and the rest of the Paulines (cf. Kenny's stylometric analysis that concludes 1&2 Timothy aren't that too different from the rest of the Paulines, but Titus is more different).

I'm just saying that some of these recent studies may require "Skeptic" to ask a different question. To mix my metaphors: As regards NT authorship/style attribution, I think we've beaten the vocabulary horse to death, and that dog don't hunt.

Pauline authorship adherents certainly need to do their homework too. I think one valuable area would be external evidence like early quotations from church fathers (Polycarp? Irenaeus? Didache?), canon lists, text-critical evidence and the like. Some work has been done in these areas, but more can certainly be done.

But the authorship question still remains so I say let's try some other approaches. Let's examine syntactic affinities between texts, now that we have a syntactically analyzed Greek New Testament available, and see what happens. Perhaps that dog won't hunt either. But we don't know 'til we tromp the cornfields and see what Fido does when we flush the bird.