Visualizing Data in the Quantitative Comparison of Ancient Texts: a Study of Paul, Epictetus, and Philodemus

In a recent monograph,1 I argued for formal overlaps between several roughly contemporary texts in what I termed a shared “socio-literary sphere”: the letters of the Christian apostle Paul, the Stoic popular philosopher Epictetus’ Discourses, and the Epicurean scholar Philodemus’ On Death and On Piety. Further, certain other writings – Seneca’s Natural Questions, Letter to the Hebrews, and 4 Maccabees – were likewise found to have formal similarities close to Paul’s letters. These findings stood in contrast to several other types of texts often likened to Paul’s letters, such as formal Greco-Roman orations (e.g., Aelius Aristides’ Panathenaic Orations, Dio Chrysostom’s orations) and sectarian Jewish literature (e.g., the Damascus Document), which were found in fact to be quite dissimilar to Paul’s letters. This comparative project was based on a polythetic approach to classification, whereby each text was defined not by essential terms such as genre or ethnicity but by a wide set of non-essential literary criteria. These criteria were inductively derived, formal, second-order characteristics that I hand-coded into spreadsheets and visualized graphically. In this way, providing second-order criteria that I inductively derived and empirically applied, I demonstrated that certain texts should be understood as closely related, based on methods and findings that were transparent, quantifiable, and therefore able to be visualized clearly. I further argued that this type of approach and conclusion was preferable to previous, existing approaches based on more essentialized understandings of literature.2 In other words, I provided second-order theorization, application, and data-based conclusions from the digital humanities around biblical literature in its literary, ancient Mediterranean context.