Paul's Literary Style

Paul's Literary Style determines quantitatively how Paul varies the style of his writing to assist communication with different communities and to ascertain some constant characteristics of his writing. Using 2 Corinthians 11:16-12:13, Romans 8:9-39, and Philippians 3:2-4:13, the author uncovers the performance of ten stylistic operations: sentence changes, complexity of the writing, adverbs and adverbial clauses, propositional reduction; logical diagrams, abstract versus concrete nouns, imagery, Leo Spitzer's philological circle, verb density, and variety of sentence length. In this study, stylistics denotes the use of linguistics as a tool of literary criticism by which to investigate the aesthetic effects of language. This methodology produces an investigation to compare Paul's style of communication to three different communities and discover his adaptations to different audiences.