Twenty-One* Pseudo-Chrysostoms and more: authorship verification in the patristic world

As the most prolific of the Church Fathers, John Chrysostom (344-407 CE) has a vast textual mass and theological importance that has led to a significant misattribution of texts, resulting in the existence of a second corpus known as the pseudo-Chrysostomian corpus. Like many Greek-language Church Fathers' works, this corpus comprises anonymous texts, which scholars have attempted to reattribute or group together based on factors such as the person's function, biography, ideology, style, etc. One survey conducted by Voicu in 1981 explored potential groupings of such texts and produced a critical list of 21 Pseudo-Chrysostom works identified by scholars, including Montfaucon (1655-1741), one of the first modern editors of Chrysostom's writings. In this paper, we present a novel approach to addressing pseudonymous work in the context of chrysostomian studies. We propose to employ siamese networks within an authorship verification framework, following the methodology commonly used in recent computational linguistic competitions. Our embedding model is trained using commonly used features in the digital humanities landscape, such as the most frequent words, affixes, and POS trigrams, utilizing a signal-to-noise ratio distance and pair mining. The results of our model show high AUCROC scores (0.855). Furthermore, the article concludes with an analysis of the pseudo-Chrysostoms proposed by Voicu. We validate a significant portion of the hypotheses found in Voicu's survey while also providing counter-arguments for two Pseudo-Chrysostoms. This research contributes to shedding light on the attribution of ancient texts and enriches the field of chrysostomian studies.