The 2025 Howard Lecture title is "Fuzzy Math: The Challenge of Counting Paul’s Authentic Letters."

Dr. White, Chair; Associate Professor (New Testament and Early Christianity), is a scholar of ancient and modern interpretations of the New Testament, the reconstruction of Christian origins, and the development of early Christianities. The following is an abstract for his Howard Lecture:

What counts as “Pauline”?  For nearly 1,700 years the answer seemed fairly straightforward.  The New Testament canon set the boundary at thirteen (or fourteen, including Hebrews) authentic Pauline Epistles.  The identification of the historical Paul with the canonical Paul was severed, however, in the early-nineteenth century, leading to the distinctions between “undisputed” and “disputed” Pauline Epistles that have oriented the academic study of Paul ever since.  Because of the subjective nature of so much of the argumentation over the authenticity of the Pauline Epistles as it developed in the nineteenth century, the analysis of authorial style took on increasing weight as a way out of having to make special decisions.  The linguistic features of texts could be counted, averaged, and compared.  In measuring one text’s language against another, the Pauline stylome would emerge as the incontrovertible standard for uncovering canonical forgeries in the Apostle’s name.  In this talk I will argue that the entire enterprise of “counting” Paul is misguided and that our distinctions between the “historical” Paul and the Paul of “tradition” are much less firm than many think.