Jeremy Menicucci

In order for your argument to make sense you have to assert that anyone's experience of salvation is unknowable, which is just blatantly false regardless of whether or not you are a Calvinist. Even though Calvinists can be called for Jury Duty and know that, somehow the God of the universe's effectual call is somehow defined by Calvinists as pointless (in your view). You also grossly misrepresent Calvinism and technically Biblical Christianity as a whole, which is why you plainly dodged my response. No one's assurance of salvation is rooted in some sort of inner confused monologue; it's rooted in the objective work of Jesus Christ. Until you recognize that aspect of Calvinism, your reasoning here is sui generis, and it might score you points with your followers, but it does nothing to meaningfully interact with or refute Calvinism.

But how do you know that applies to you? Here is the argument: Calvinism asserts that though God has the power to save all people, He prefers to damn many people, if not most people, to hell. So the question is: what objective assurance does the Calvinist have that God prefers to save him? The Calvinist has no objective assurance in the character of God for his salvation, because God does not prefer to save everyone. Why would the Calvinist think that God does not prefer to damn him, the same way that God prefers to damn any other reprobate? The Calvinist can take no objective assurance in his own perception of his salvation, for maybe God predestined him to think he is saved when he is not. If God does not prefer to save him, certainly God owes him no notification that he’s not chosen. The Calvinist’s only possibility of assurance is in his own subjective experience of his profession of faith. But what if it was just an attempt at faith in Christ by his own efforts, and not the divine gift of faith? There is no objective way for the Calvinist to know. The Calvinist’s only supposed assurance is an anthropocentric, human-centered assurance grounded in self. His assurance only exists in his own head. He is just patting himself on the back, talking to himself in the mirror and telling himself his eternity is secure.

In what ways does a non Calvinist have a monopoly on this? Especially, for example, in the case of those loved ones who walk away from the faith? It seems that whatever standard you apply for assurance is equally or even more fully wrong in those situations. Is it because they "made a decision?" And in what cases would that be more reassuring that a Calvinist saying "its because God made a decision?"

@MrTimothyRenfro The finished work of Christ and his ongoing intercession.

@jmenicucci Can you name me any basis for assurance of salvation that is not subjective?

No single Calvinist is clueless on whether or not God prefers to save them, or whether or not God has provided sufficient means to save them. The Calvinist assurance of salvation is literally entirely theocentric: that's the essence of Calvinism. So it sounds like your issue is with your view of Calvinism, rather than Calvinism itself.

The Biblical Christian has objective assurance of the following: he knows God prefers to save him, he knows God has provided sufficient means to save him, and he knows he is a sinner who can only be saved by grace. All three things he is certain of, and therefore can have complete assurance of salvation. However, the Calvinist only knows he is a sinner in need of grace. The Calvinist does not know if God prefers to save him, and he does not know if God has provided sufficient means to save him, because according to Calvinism Christ did not die for everyone, only for the elect. So the Calvinist has no objective, theocentric assurance of salvation, while the Biblical Christian does.

Cuz all the people he asked to pray directly to Jesus were still alive?

I originally came across this for my Lamentations Dissertation overviewing authorship. At most MFW, it the closest Delta to Lamentations is Jeremiah. At every MFW and every variation in the LXX, Jeremiah is also the closest. That's actually where I got the idea to apply it on this scale.

@jmenicucci Bro, this is very fascinating. How well does this sort of test hold up in the academic world toward authorship of disputed works? Or is that even a thing? I have no idea, just thinking out loud.

This is a PCA plot showing my application of Cosine Delta to the Greek NT, the LXX, and Apocrypha texts. The plot shows that stylistically, the NT is much closer to the OT than to any Apocryphal book surveyed. It also shows that the OT is more stylistically similar to itself than to Apocryphal texts. These Apocryphal texts are all extremely similar to each other and dissimilar to both the NT and the OT combined, suggesting they represent a clearly extra-Biblical stylistic tradition.

It isn't faulty to use the LXX, a better critique is to state that it's limiting, but it isn't faulty. The NT authors cite from either existing Greek texts or translate into Greek, so the LXX cannot be dismissed as easily. Many DSS do not reflect fully extant books, and you make an assumption that every dead sea scroll is homogenous. In my work in Lamentations, for example, Lamentations is not fully represented in 4QLam, and chapter 1 (which is the bulk of its attestation) has different structural words than MTLam, this would skew the data, not help. Numerous LXX books have been identified as slavishly literal translations. I've checked Greek words with Muraoko's Hebrew/Aramaic concordance, and the data barely shifts. In many places the underlying Hebrew is accurately represented. Furthermore, I've previous stylometric analysis on the OT Hebrew intracorpus, and a similar homophily exists as what's represented here. Even so, the Apocryphal works timeframe overlaps with the translation of canonical OT books, and both the Apocrypha and the NT are koine Greek, so running the test using only Greek showing Apocryphal and NT/LXX variance cannot be accounted for on the basis of using the same language or by standardization. That's a literal contradiction in terms. You cannot have variance in standarized similarity. That would mean everything should cluster closer together, and they don't. To your point, however, employing the Hebrew text is useful, but on the basis of your critique, we should expect the OT to isolate from the Apocrypha on the basis of a translational barrier. There absolutely can be problems in the test I ran, but simply using the LXX on its own is not inherently problematic.

While I'm a big fan of the Greek, this is faulty and it would be more valid to compare dead sea scroll and similar pre-Masoretic sources. The LXX is a kind of steam roller that standardized the texts between specific origins. You're probably identifying the specific Greek writers tasked with the work.

@Mnr_vnBoeloeftn @Aelthemplaer No section of Job, Psalms, or Song of Songs is "written in Aramaic," the phenomenon present in them is more properly classified as "Aramaisms." Be that as it may, as I explained in the OP, this test was run on the LXX.

@Aelthemplaer @jmenicucci (or was it Song of Songs…?)

God decided which books are in the Canon. This test technically isn't making a canonical claim, it's showing that the 39 OT books and 27 NT books share a common stylistic register that is different from apocryphal books. A canonical conclusion can be drawn from that, but you can just as easily argue that it's more indicative of the apocrypha's use of Greek rhetoric.

@jmenicucci And where are you getting the presupposition that frequency of word usage is the measure of if something is God breathed Scripture? How do you decide which books are in Scripture?

The Apostles didn't use "the LXX" because in their day, they quoted from Greek translations of the OT, there was no such thing as "the LXX" with absolutely zero Greek Text groupings of Apocrypha + OT, the way you have it in 4th century Codices and beyond (which even disagree over Maccabees). Jewish tradition shows that the 39-book Protestant OT canon was closed by the 1st century BC at the latest. The existence of Apocryphal works prior to the 1st century AD =/= existing in the canon. The test I ran is based on the 150 Most Frequent Words in every text, z-scored and calculated into a Cosine Delta. You can literally run this test yourself and fact check it, but I'm sure it's easier to call it made up than to actually do the work to interact with it.

Notice this guy isnt showing us what he actually measured by? You can make up a measure that will show the exact opposite results. The Apostles using the Septuagint with these books is infinitely more compelling than a guy with a made up mystery chart that says the books dont sound like other books. Layers on layera of shallow argumentation. As if the semantic style is what makes the text God breathed 🤣🤣🤣

@hekwoys I've ran a separate Burrows' delta test on 2 Timothy before, and it returned similar data, clustering away from Colossians and Ephesians which were apart of the corpus I used for that test. It really is interesting.

@jmenicucci Very interesting that 1 Timothy and Titus do cluster with the Pauline letters but 2 Timothy is off with Hebrews and James

It absolutely has scholarly rigor: Evert, S., Proisl, T., Jannidis, F., Rybicki, J., Schöch, C., and Eder, M. (2017). "Understanding and Explaining Delta Measures for Authorship Attribution." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32(suppl_2) Eder, M., Rybicki, J., and Kestemont, M. (2016). "Stylometry with R: A Package for Computational Stylistic Analysis." R Journal 8(1), 107–121 Jannidis, F., Pielström, S., Schöch, C., and Vitt, T. (2015). "Improving Burrows' Delta — An Empirical Evaluation of Text Distance Measures." Digital Humanities 2015 Conference Abstracts Just because you don't understand something and have never looked into it doesn't mean someone "made it up."

@jmenicucci Just because you didn’t invent it doesn’t mean it has any scholarly rigor. Somebody made it up and then you used it to make up this graph.

You can just make up text criticism btw.

Basically, I ran a calculation based on the 150 Most Frequent words that are relative to means in each text, e.g. the amount of times a text uses a function word like "for." This then calculates the difference between the way each texts' standard deviation from that mean, lower values = greater stylistic similarity.

@jmenicucci For the muggles amongst us, is there somewhere we can read a layman's explanation?

@KnaackCarl PC1 represents the axis of maximum variance across all 150 function word features.

@jmenicucci Interesting, what is PC1 representing here? Without the PC1 part of the plot the Apocrypha fits between the LXX and NA28 parts of the graph.

@ThisOrTheOtter Most Frequent words at 150, z-score normalized.

@jmenicucci How did you operationalize your PCA plot? It is the most used words or something else?

@JulianLozan1 This is Cosine Delta, calculating the most frequent words of each text (MFW), which typically accounts for function words.

@jmenicucci What variables did you use for selecting the styles of these texts?

@MatthewDePra Pretty sure this will have to switch to the skeleton gif soon.

Me still waiting on the Roman Catholic Church to infallibly interpret more than a handful of Bible verses after 2000 years.

For this to happen, one has to misunderstand both Sola Scriptura and the Bible.