Stylometric Perspectives on the Composition Debate of Acts of Andrew

This paper engages with the ongoing scholarly debate surrounding the composition of the Acts of Andrew, particularly the question of whether the Acts of Andrew and Matthew in the City of the Cannibals (AAM) should be considered an original part of the text. While this issue has been extensively discussed, most prior studies have focused on selected excerpts rather than the complete corpus. Rather than offering definitive judgments or claiming methodological superiority, we apply computational methods to the full texts in order to revisit and enrich the debate. Through stylometric analysis, we reassess earlier claims in the literature, confirming, for instance, the overuse of periphrastic constructions and the prevalence of simple language in AAM, while offering nuanced support for others, such as the positioning of verbs and grammatical simplicity. We hope this study will demonstrate the potential of computational approaches to revisit humanities problems by treating a larger volume of data and systematizing previous scholarly claims made using a small data sample, due to the tediousness of manually counting word and grammatical occurrences.