What did Jesus wear when soldiers mocked him?

[spud the mackem]

Well I guess he wasn't wearing his best "funeral" black suit,and black tie. He probably wore the prison clothes of that period,or just his ordinary work gear.Whatever he wore or didnt wear they still murdered him.

[eight bits]

Tiggs

That was interesting. I was able to get hold of the book and take a look. I haven't read it through, and don't intend to wiggle onto the hook for or against the single-author hypothesis.

Which is why the analysis is run, instead, on the seams and summaries rather than the book as a whole. As for the methodology - I believe it uses a Chi-Square Contingency Table Test - which, other than being some sort of method to measure the correlation between two things, is completely over my head.

The good news is that the authors' use of the chi-square test is straightforward. Are the two samples (selections from Luke and selections from Acts) drawn from the same text-generating distribution? Not likely, apparently. OK, let's just take that as given. [/statistics]

If one author wrote both, would I expect the two samples to be from the same distribution? That's not a statisitcal question, it's a modeling problem: how or how much does author-editorship influence what's in the two samples? Apart from a difference in personnel, differences in the samples could result from the features used (are these things that "should be" constant for a given author?), how I drew the samples, and ways that the same compiler could behave differently (writing in different genres, or writing at different times in his life, for example).

Just quickly, then, Walters seems vulnerable on her choice of features and how she drew the sample, her "seams and summaries." Yes, that selection scheme picks out material that was likely written by the author-editor, but it also picks out material written for local purposes. Why wouldn't literary choices made to join two passages, written by somebody(-ies) else, depend on the specific passages being joined? Why wouldn't literary choices made in a summary of passages, written by somebody(-ies) else, depend on the specific passages being summarized?

I don't have an answer, and getting an answer would be a lot more work than reading the whole book carefully, and I haven't even done that. But it isn't a slam-dunk, and reading more of the book with more care is likely to make that worse before it gets better.

Quite apart from any debate surrounding the book, I believe that while "Luke" may have approached both books as a single genre (broadly history), "Gospel" may also be a genre in its own right, in a way that an ecclesiastical history isn't quite the same. I also think that there is a "reconciliation of familiar sources" problem that is more urgent in the Gospel than in the church history. Speaking third is a different situation than speaking first - especially if the "second speaker" was Matthew of the two asses.

So, since I'm not on the hook for single-authorship, let me leave this analysis, for now at least, as being interesting, even mind-expanding, but still disputable.