Scholars have long supposed that certain books of the Bible were written by a number of different authors.
Now a team of language researchers is using computers to determine Bible authorship, and they’re coming up with some surprising findings. Can text give an author’s identity away? How can computers determine who wrote what?
Linguist Daniel Midgley tells the story on this week’s Talk the Talk.
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A good intro:
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/jazz/52100667-183/bible-software-text-author.html.csp?page=1
The ACL paper. Pretty readable, but mostly for hardcores. (PDF)
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-1136.pdf
A really good series from the Straight Dope team about Bible authorship
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1985/who-wrote-the-bible-part-1
And something from the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible about discrepancies
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/accounts.html
