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Dustin White a.k.a. The Curious Christian

2025CE-Present

  • This page is not exactly about mythicism. It was added because the articles are brought up enough as a refutation by people who don't know how bad the arguments are.
  • The articles are not directly linked to because they do not deserve additional attention. Searching for them will help his search engine results, but linking to them may convey legitimacy.
  • Dustin opened a Medium account in June 2025 and wrote four articles attempting to discredit the book Christ Before Jesus.
  • Keep in mind that Dustin does not disclose his own credentials on his about page.
  • Dustin demonstrates a tendency to distort what was said in Christ Before Jesus. Which will be demonstrated. This suggests that he indeed understands what's being presented but he chooses to deceive people, wagering that his readers will not take the energy required to investigate his claims.
  • Dustin's articles appear to be written ad hoc because he demonizes concepts/methods he doesn't understand, only to appear to have figured them out later, without fixing the previous statements.
  • Dustin hints at nefarious intent by Christ Before Jesus but doesn't contact them about it. Even though he reveals that he contacted them and asked them other questions and admits to their friendliness. He was suspiciously selective in his decisions to contact them.
  • It's expository that Dustin goes to great lengths to paint Christ Before Jesus as incompetent but he never posts any dendrograms or evidence to disprove their findings.
  • Failing Stylometry Jun 23, 2025 (in order by paragraph)
    • In this article he opens with a straw man; Christ Before Jesus isn't making the claim that stylometry can prove that Jesus didn't exist. Stylometry is only in 2 chapters (of 9, excluding the introduction) and one of them is explaining what it is, meaning it was only utilized for 1 chapter, 12.5% of the book (excluding the explanation chapter).
    • Dustin says their book isn't a first-of-it's-kind analysis. However, he partially walks back the comment a few paragraphs later, admitting that it was done on chapters instead of the entire book. This clarification was after poisoning the well.
    • In fact, in the book, on page 207 (Kindle edition) that Dustin quotes, they mention the first use of stylometry on the New Testament was back in the 1980's. Dustin attempts to twist it by saying they were claiming it was the first use on a computer. He cites It’s Greek to the Computer, where it was used on Greek works, but it does not appear to utilize the New Testament.
    • Dustin partially quotes page 207 in order to make it sound like their analysis is futile. The full quote from the book is "However, even to this day the majority of stylometric analysis done on the New Testament texts makes the assumption that looking at them alongside second-century texts would be of no avail." He only quoted the italicized portion. Earlier in the book they make the case for second-century authorship.
    • Dustin states that stylometry can't be used to date texts. With some basic level critical thinking, linguistic styles can be closer related to one another due to how the writers of those societies at the time learn and how language evolves. An example is provided on the Stylometry page. We can also date a writing if the author is identified, naturally, it follows that the writing was done during their lifetime.
    • Dustin attacks the size of the corpus. He cites Matthew Brook O'Donnell's work Corpus Linguistics and the Greek of the New Testament but this work was published in 2005. The distance formula utilized by Christ Before Jesus hadn't been formulated until a decade later (released in 2016). Eder's formulas work best on highly inflective languages like Greek and Latin, and English is weakly inflective. Dustin relies on outdated recommendations for his argument. His concerns are addressed on page 218 under the title "Shouldn't you run x-n-grams, x Most Frequent Words, x Delta, etc.?" this gets addressed below.
    • Dustin is displeased by the use of the phrase "peer-reviewed." Christ Before Jesus states, transparently, that it applies to the software that was used. It's in the statement, there is no asterisk or footnote. There is no intention to deceive.
    • Dustin asserts claims of inaccuracy but his only support is information that has been outdated by decades. Dustin is not an expert and his confidence in the unreliability is ill-informed. I link to where peer reviewed articles and information on accuracy can be found on the Stylometry page.
    • Dustin brings Dr. Nina Livesey's qualifications into question. Ignoring that her life's work has been on Paul. He refers to her as an outlier, without offering any details or in depth insight on her work. A lot of groundbreaking work begins as an outlier, Dr. Livesey's released work is still recent. The scholarly consensus does not move swiftly.
    • Dustin doesn't reference anything recent that demonstrates advances in the field. Instead, he presents his opinions as an authority and questions the education and comprehension of the authors of Christ Before Jesus.
    • Dustin refers to the book as "publishing research." That wasn't the goal of the book. To reiterate, stylometric analysis isn't the primary topic, it's only used to support their primary arguments.
    • Dustin brings up page 208, bemoaning the lack of details. He says he doesn't know if they used Eder's Delta or Eder's Simple. Unfortunately, the page he cites contains a reference to Eder's Delta specifically AND supplies the formula. Additionally, on page 209 they clarify that they use both. From my research, Eder's Simple tends to be slightly more forgiving with distance than Eder's Delta. Though, admittedly, I am not a data scientist, but I have done work for the Government that was peer reviewed by a data scientist. If Dustin is complaining about which one is used, his research should be in question; it's the matter of a single radio option in the GUI of Stylo. It takes 1 click to change it, so running it with both is not a herculean task. The name of the file it produces is different for each, so they can be compared side by side. Furthermore, he later discloses that Christ Before Jesus provide this information in an email. He doesn't disclose when he sent or received the reply email.
    • Dustin mentions Burrows (Classic Delta) as the standard, this is mentioned in Eder's "Does Size Matter" article. It also states "Delta exhibits some methodological pitfalls, including the lack of validation of the obtained results, and the tacit assumption of variables' independence". The Eder formulas are particularly useful for highly inflected languages like Greek and Latin. Dustin states that the results can be manipulated by switching between Eder's Delta and Eder's Simple, but from my own observations, they aren't so drastically different that they would skew the results to distort the signal of an author to cause it to switch places on sufficient data sets. Remarkably, Dustin provides no evidence or examples for his statements. At best, he's only providing a guess.
    • Dustin says that Matthew and Jaaron tailored their approach specifically to Greek texts from around 200BCE to 300CE. This appears to be a stumbling block for him; he's unable to decipher this confounding puzzle. We all know that Google is super-duper hard; Perseus contains a wide range of Greek and Latin texts. This is also a source Matthew and Jaaron provide when you ask them. The data does require some cleaning (markup primarily) but admittedly this takes more effort than the complexities of changing a radio value on a menu.
    • Dustin falsely says Christ Before Jesus doesn't detect genre. They didn't state that exactly, they presented a dendrogram of Latin writings that were correctly grouped by authorship. They stated "Notice that the genre doesn't matter. We have letters and formally written works from Pliny, Cicero, and Ovid, but they show up correctly attributed to the author rather than grouped by genre. If Stylo detected genre, the letters from these authors should show up in a group with just letters rather than correctly attributed to their respective authors as they do here." In other words, the genre wasn't influential enough over the style of the author to cause them to group by genre. Comparisons can be found where it will group genres written by the same author. For example if an author writes detective novels and horror, they will often show the same author but the genres will be closer in distance to one another. This can also be observed in the works of Josephus (which he brings up, but his reasoning is flawed), the relations to the topics or the chronological order will cause books to cluster together. However, when another author is introduced, there is a clear separation of distance between them, but their own works still cluster together more closely, demonstrating a strong authorship signal.
    • Dustin cites a paper that discusses the grouping of the synoptic gospels by genre. This isn't the best citation because they aren't running it at the chapter level. At the book level Stylo will treat the entire work as one author. A part of the argument of Christ Before Jesus that they demonstrate, is that multiple authors are involved.
    • Dustin also tries to cast doubt by listing the things that could influence results. Yet, he fails to recognize the shared topic and genre of the gospels, or the assumed authorship of the epistles. He glazed over the results showing authorship precedence over these factors.
    • Dustin quotes Eder on sample size when it is beneficial to his agenda of obscuring facts. Here is a statement from Eder about sample size. Essentially, it helps to know what you're doing.
    • Dustin doesn't like that the formula, distance measurement, and MFWs are missing from some of the dendrograms. From experience, these graphs are large, cropping can be preferred to maintain legibility, especially when it's required to consider what will be in a physically printed book. Christ Before Jesus has shown the full images when they were politely asked to. They aren't intentionally obscuring results. Besides, the distance between authors/works is shown by the lines on the graph, that visual separation is primarily what's needed to demonstrate differences in authorship.
    • If stylometry was as unreliable as Dustin makes it out to be, he should have taken a page from his own critique and been transparent by providing screenshots, disclosing the data, and providing the parameters used to debunk Christ Before Jesus' findings. It's very eye-opening to notice that he didn't. Instead, he cherry-picked what he thought would protect his dogma instead of providing damning data.
  • A Terrible Methodology: Christ Before Jesus Jun 27, 2025
    • Dustin starts by questioning methodology. The methodology was discussed in the breakdown above. He also discloses near the very end that they were provided to him in an email. He also neglects to realize the settings they used and provided to him are all shown in a dendrogram in the book. Then he complains about that too.
    • Dustin says Matthew and Jaaron don't know the limitations of stylometry. Even though they show the results of tests they performed on small Greek texts around 100 words in length, they address potential concerns, and go over the reasons for their methodology. This is all available on pages 216 through 226.
    • Dustin builds another straw man on a faulty foundation; Christ Before Jesus says they couldn't get a good read on Philemon, which is under 400 Greek words. They combine other chapters together to achieve a larger corpus size.
    • Dustin states "they claim that Philemon also fell below the average 400 words. Yet that's not true. In most English versions of the Bible, Philemon is somewhere between 430 and 490 words." At the end of the next paragraph he finally pieces it together "But maybe they were actually talking about the original Greek text." Page 224 of Christ Before Jesus says "Of course, when we run this in Stylo, we are running it based on the original Greek and not English translations." He then admits that the number of Greek words aligns with what Christ Before Jesus claimed. Dustin accuses Matthew and Jaaron of not telling the truth, he then speculates on what was used. Ignoring the fact that the answer was in the book, in the relevant location.
    • Dustin must enjoy inventing work for himself. On page 217 of Christ Before Jesus they stated "Chapters for the Pauline Epistles and other texts tended to have closer to an average of around 400 words." If you pay close attention to exactly what they said they mention the Pauline Epistles but not the Pastorals. There are an average of 390 words (389 with Philemon) both are close to 400. Here are my word counts by chapter. Note: In my word counter punctuation was removed along with these Greek characters: ⸂ ʼ ⸃ ⸀ ·. Dustin brings those characters up in a different article. Christ Before Jesus doesn't use Philemon because they couldn't reliably identify it. In the long run Christ Before Jesus couldn't get a reliable result or had inconsistent results from Philemon due to the size, but that doesn't mean you can't get a reliable read on all texts around that size.
    • Dustin quote mines a 2015 paper "Does Size Matter" by Maciej Eder stating the results are "simply disastrous" with samples below 3,000 words. That same paper quotes another paper from 2001 stating: "for stylometric reliability the minimum sample size allowed is 1,000 words". It is worth mentioning that a new methodology has been demonstrated to have an accuracy of around 84.2%-89.6% for texts containing 50 words.
    • Dustin is correctly stating what others have discovered regarding sample size. Contrary to those findings, Maciej Eder states "there is no single answer to the question of the sample size." stating that sometimes 100 can be enough and sometimes 10,000 will not be enough. Basically, there is no "one size fits all" solution. Dustin is making the same mistakes that the majority of critics make by attempting to set hard limits on something they do not understand. Unsurprisingly, we do not see any attempts by Dustin to replicate the findings or confirm his suspicions. His misunderstanding of the methodology is not a failure in methodology by Christ Before Jesus.
    • Dustin moves on to most-frequent words. He doesn't disclose here that the default setting in Stylo is 100 MFWs. He does note it later. It isn't until his last article that he seems to understand MFWs. Meanwhile, in this article he mentions that Eder's Delta peaks around 1,000-1,500 MFWs and he believes that since the texts are "less than 1,000 words, and average closer to 400, there is going to be a serious problem here." The only serious part about that is the lack of understanding, because a text containing 1,000 words, isn't going to have 1,000 MFW's. In reality, it will have far fewer than that. Using this spreadsheet, we can see that 1 Corinthians 15 contains 843 words but only 397 are unique (~47%). 1 single word is used 40 times, and there are 272 words that are used only once. Those 272 words (~68% of the unique words) aren't frequent, individually they represent 0.11% of the total of 843 words. This means that ~42% (53) of the remaining 125 words are used twice or more, and 125 MFWs could be used on this text if you want only want to exclude single use words, this is also closer to the definition of frequent. If you want words used 4 times or more, you would only need to enter 50 MFWs. With 94 MFWs you're getting every word used twice or more, eliminating the "noise" of single unique words. With this knowledge, the default of 100 MFWs is reasonable.
    • Dustin brings up the analysis of the Christ Before Jesus book itself. Again, he waves the penalty flag a non-problem and fails to understand one-size-does-not-fit-all and that English and Greek aren't the same.
    • Dustin says "they do claim to be using the NIV translation". Either this is a misunderstanding, ignorance, or intentional deception. The introduction clearly states "All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV" if words still mean words, Christ Before Jesus only used the NIV for quoting scripture unless otherwise indicated which is exactly noted when the use the American Standard Version in chapter 7. They didn't use it for their stylometry runs.
    • Dustin believes Christ Before Jesus isn't being transparent when they say they've tried a variety of values. They do talk about n-grams on page 209 and say "even at the single-word level, though our usage of vocabulary is different enough to be able to tell the difference between authors in many cases." It can be presumed that when it's not explicitly stated that they're using a single n-gram.
    • Dustin complains that they mention that they consulted publications but didn't list them. While Dustin has no problem looking up papers evidenced by his unlinked references in this article alone, he apparently only cares to do it when it serves his agenda of writing a hit-piece and not when it would be harmful to his position. This page must be too hard or too convenient to find even though later in the article, he mentions it in a round-about way.
    • Dustin believes there is a large learning curve but seems to neglect that Christ Before Jesus says on page 219 "We spent months gathering texts and checking the data quality of them before running Stylo." they in fact did invest the time. Jaaron is also a data scientist. Dustin appears to believe they are simple-minded dolts incapable of putting their expertise to work.
    • Dustin says he reached out to Christ Before Jesus for clarification. They disclosed that some information they possessed could not be shared due to copyright concerns. Dustin accuses them of shifting the goal post. Dustin appears to get confused again when he states "In their book, they make the very specific claim that they used academic papers on Stylo. In their response to me, they moved the claim to incorporate stylometry as a whole, as well as other analyses of texts." he's referencing this on page 218 (The context is in reference to the GUI parameters in Stylo) "As such, the way we approached selecting our setup was based on our trial runs and a number of academic papers regarding Stylo." (Emphasis mine). They didn't use academic papers on Stylo, instead they read academic papers to get recommendations for the settings they selected when running Stylo.
    • Dustin appears late to piecing this one together, after bemoaning that Matthew and Jaaron link to an article by Jacques Savoy "Authorship of Pauline Epistles Revisited" he says it "does not mention Stylo in any form" but one of the images has this description "Ranked lists produced by the Delta model (200 MFT, Greek version)", making it obvious that he utilized stylometry, even if it was not Stylo specifically. Dustin does eventually piece this one together.
    • Dustin accepts Savoy's run of Philemon. He also changes his tune and takes Savoy's word that 200 MFWs is sufficient in order to discredit Christ Before Jesus. Dustbin again fails to notice simple details; the distance formula isn't the same. Savoy is using Delta and not Eder's Delta or Eder's Simple. Looking at Philemon, I only see 336 words in my Greek from the Society of Biblical Literature Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) which is the version Christ Before Jesus used. Dustin discloses they told him this in his last article. Doing some more simple math based on this spreadsheet we see there are 144 words used once (70.5% of the 204 unique words and 42.8% of the total words). A setting of just 60 MFWs includes all words used more than once.
    • Dustin also says Christ Before Jesus contradicts themselves regarding level of difficulty. However, they're comparing setting up and using the software to the amount of research they put into the project, the quality of the data, and results. Dustin is complaining about how much diligence they put into researching it. The entire time Dustin has painted them as incompetent, only to complain about how much work they put into it, and then simultaneously acts as if Stylo is far too complicated and difficult to use himself. He doesn't post any results of his own and he eventually makes an indication that he has run stylo in his last article.
    • Dustin does admit that they answered all of his questions and were friendly. Maybe he didn't intend to reveal that his entire bias and distaste for Christ Before Jesus is based on his disagreement with their results. Dustin attacks everything he can while avoiding even attempting to prove their results wrong.
  • Christ Before Jesus: Are they Making it Up Jun 29, 2025
    • Dustin questions why Christ Before Jesus doesn't use random sampling on small texts. Even though they explain it. I'll break it down using Greek examples using a large and small text.
      • Philemon
        • There are 144 unique single use words. They make up 42.8% of the 336 total words.
        • The 3 most frequent words are used 35 times, 10% of the 336 total words.
        • If we expand it to words used 5 times or more, we have 85 words, 25.5% of the total.
        • You're almost twice as likely to get infrequent words with random sampling than words used 5 times or more.
      • Eusebius Historia Ecclesiastica Book 1
        • It contains 2,560 unique single use words, 25.8% of the 9,909 total words.
        • The top 3 words are used 981 times, making them 9% of the 9,909 total words. The top 3 MFWs are almost the same percentage.
        • However, the difference of getting an infrequent word between the smaller text and the larger one is a significant 17%.
        • Now when we expand the Eusebius comparison to words used 5 times or more like was done to Philemon, we have 4,148 words, 41.8% of the 9,909 total words.
        • Making frequent words in Eusebius almost as likely to be chosen as the infrequent words in Philemon.
      Of course there will be variations and exceptions, this is just an example.
    • This is not an attack on random sampling! Random sampling has been demonstrated to be a reliable method of determining accuracy of stylometry, high accuracy plateaus between 5,000 to 10,000 and the data shows accuracy can break down with smaller sample sets. However, that doesn't mean that accuracy is impossible or a high confidence can't be attained with fewer words.
    • Dustin questions why they mention the letter of Paul having line by line edits. A good source for this reasoning is Dr. Jason BeDuhn and his book The First New Testament which contains reconstructions of the earliest versions of the Epistles.
    • Dustin complains again that the results can't be reconstructed even though he has communicated with Christ Before Jesus and confirmed the settings, and knows through academic papers that it's permissible to test parameters, which are present in the dendrogram image on page 211 (100 MFW Culled @ 0% Eders Simple distance). If you run Stylo and use more than one n-gram it will say: 100 MFW 2-grams Culled @ 0% Eder's Simple distance. The first option tab in the GUI allow you to choose the language, that should be self-explanatory and hopefully you know what language the text you're analysing is.
    • Dustin splits hairs about "Photoshopping." Yes, Christ Before Jesus uses cropped images, but photoshop isn't needed for that; it can be done with the default screen capture in Windows (Windows key + shift + s) or Mac (Command + shift + 4). They're obviously referring to image manipulation, either by creating the graphs by hand or modifying the image to fit their narrative.
    • Dustin accused Christ Before Jesus of playing with the details to get the results they want, but why would they invite people to challenge their work and provide manipulated data? It would quickly disprove them. It's revealing that Dustin doesn't even make an attempt to do it, instead he attacks the methodology without understanding it, and he even flip-flops on his own statements. It has been demonstrated that the missing details he crows about are in-fact present. Regardless, Dustin can't recognize them from the images or what was printed in the book. If the values can be manipulated so easily, why doesn't Dustin demonstrate it? He can't seem to be bothered to attempt to debunk the results even after getting the parameters explicitly provided to him in an email.
    • Dustin points out that stylometry can't date texts. This was addressed before, but I'll do it again. We can observe distances that are closer to authors that wrote around the same time, compared to authors that wrote before them or after them. Furthermore, if the author signal clearly shows a specific individual wrote something, and we know when they lived, we know it was during their lifetime. For example if we compare Richard Bachman to Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft. Poe and Lovecraft would probably be closer in distance than the other writers, we'd also see Koontz and King closer in distance since they're contemporary, but revealing that Bachman is Stephen King, we would then know exactly when Bachman wrote. Dustin's analogy uses a father and son, they wouldn't show up as the same person, but they would likely not be very distant from one another on a dendrogram.
    • Dustin argues that scribes would influence writing style. That might be granted if they used multiple scribes or scribes that don't write what was asked of them verbatim. This is nothing more than a hypothetical speculation and an argument that harms his point. He even points it out and doesn't recognize how harmful it is; it would mean it definitely isn't from the original author and cannot be trusted as coming from Paul. It would be a manipulation or work of the scribe. If the scribes wrote exactly what was said then we would still expect to see the style of the person being dictated. If scribes added to the text (which was common and I reference on the page about Marcion), they would still need to modify most of the text. It's demonstrated on the Stylometry page because the Testimonium Flavianum even when it is present in the text of the original book, doesn't match the writing style of Josephus.
  • Misreading the Parable of the Sower: Christ Before Jesus Jul 4 2025
    • Dustin says he was a mythicist. He believes that Matthew and Jaaron think of themselves as above correction. If Dustin knew anything about them, he would have eventually heard that they believed Jesus existed going into this project. They wanted to study the "Christology" of Jesus, how a person became the messiah. It was through their research that they arrived at mythicism. They have continually stated from their own mouths that evidence would change their position. Dustin says he believed conspiracy theories and to be fair, there are a lot of them. However, in his four part series, his entire focus is on 1 chapter of the book. He puts zero effort into addressing anything else. Nor does Dustin point out any conspiracy theory utilized by Matt and Jaaron, he uses conspiracy as an umbrella term towards mythicism as a whole.
    • Dustin confignorantly (portmanteau of: confidently and ignorantly) says they didn't do the research, but we're supposed to trust his demonstrably flawed and cherry-picked research as comprehensive. I would cite Dunning-Krugar but that would imply some skill, he only demonstrates the confidence and none of the skill.
    • Dustin says they finally get to the topic of textual influence by theology, genre, and theme. As if they updated the book he's reading to address his concerns. This approach is foolish and manipulative; acting as if he couldn't have addressed it because it didn't exist until he wrote his final article on the subject.
    • Dustin brings up the genre again. This has been addressed on this page and is demonstrated on this site. The criticism of words having multiple spellings has been addressed and researchers utilized a similar method to get high accuracy on texts of 50 words.
    • Dustin goes over the word tables generated by Stylo and he focuses on individual words for several paragraphs. This is a noble yet futile effort because it displays a general misunderstanding of how distance is determined. If you're interested in distance formulas and some analogies relating to how they handle data check out this page. If Dustin had seen it, it could have helped his case as he certainly would have utilized his quote mining, however, it does support the positions held by Christ Before Jesus that Dustin derides. It says "This is not only falsely suggesting some kind of objectivity of the procedure, which, although it is in principle entirely formalized, documentable and reproducible, does not produce objective truths because the settings may be unsuitable to the case at hand." Additionally, to paraphrase, it recommends changing settings and knowing how to use the tool to get proper results.
    • Dustin talks about accent marks, which he says Stylo sees as separate words (I disclosed above that I remove them from my analysis). Dustin assumes that Christ Before Jesus didn't figure this out.
    • Dustin finally gets a grasp on MFW. He finally comes to the realization that on a per-chapter basis, there are instances where there will not be 100MFWs in the text.
    • Dustin questions why they quote the ASV specifically for the parable of the Sower when in the beginning of the book they say they'll use the NIV. The following sources aren't the most authoritative on the subject but they do offer insight into why one is used over the other: The Biblical Mastery Academy offers a video on YouTube comparing KJV, ASV, and NIV. This source comes up for the claim that the ASV has a more literal word-for-word translation. According to the Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange the NIV offers a better translation of the ideas.
    • Dustin appears to understand that there is nuance in Greek to English, but complaining that the literal word counts differ is a very weak "gotcha", especially when he brings up "while I was leaning Greek." This imples that he knows his argument is deceitful.
    • Dustin criticizes the ASV, which is fair, however, if he had spoken with Christ Before Jesus (which he did about other matters) instead of speculating, he would learn that the ASV is free of copyright. While the New American Standard Bible and New Revised Standard Version he recommends are both copyrighted. There was no nefarious intent behind the decision.
    • Dustin again complains about sample size, forgetting once more that they said they combined multiple chapters.
    • Dustin continues to focus on individual words, not understanding the concepts of weight, normalization, or the calculation of a matrix.
    • Dustin complains that their arguments about the sower parable are "all off", but he appears to be mistaken. I confirmed them using the ASV that they used on biblegateway. Please check them for yourself. Maybe he didn't use the ASV or he is using a different version.
    • Dustin again complains about the size of the chapters. Dismissing the explanations given and the testing performed.
    • Dustin feigns an interest in giving them benefit of the doubt directly after immediately questioning their understanding of Stylo. His statement is contradictory to the language and tone he has used in his entire series.
    • Dustin comes to the realization that the book isn't a research text, when it never claimed to be; it was written for the general population. The two chapters Dustin focused on a only minor portion of their argument, which can stand without the need of stylometry.