[steve19]

In any event the debate is which letters were or were not written by Paul. There is no reason to suspect he wrote none of them, or at least none were transcribed them to secretary. The debate is which was written by him and which were not.

Your father may have claimed it was very obvious, but nobody else thinks so.

[ggm]

His research focus outside of computer science was stylometry and statistical analysis of authorship. I suspect contextually he was saying it was obvious from a form of analysis. He was a Jewish athiest and completely uninterested in the biblical scholarship questions. His collaborator, rev Morton was a parish minister in the church of Scotland. He used to joke you could be a very good scots minister without worrying about God very much.

Golb's son idolised his father maybe too much. I wouldn't be committing crimes to defend Sid's stylometry results.

[gwd]

I've heard of these types of statistical analyses before, but they always sounded a bit suspicious to me. Have they been verified on known datasets? i.e., if I used your fathers techniques on your comment history, would it find that it was authored by a single person, or would it think there was a committee of you?

[ggm]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry is as good a reference as any to the methodologies. I know pointing people at Wikipedia is a bit passé but it gives a good summary.

I think the answer to your implied criticisms would be, "it depends"