What is the use of statistics in determining authenticity of biblical manuscripts?

Answer 1

Using corpus linguistic techniques, it is possible to ascribe probabilities to the authorship or period of a manuscript - if other manuscripts from that author or period exits. A manuscript claiming to be biblical, which mentions Moses texting his people is rather unlikely to be authentic!

If, for example, an author is particularly fond of using long words where shorter alternatives are readily available, then a piece of work containing relatively few long words is less likely to be from the same author. That is an illustrative but very simplistic example. Average letters per word, average words per sentence, commonly used words or word combinations are all measures that help build a profile of the author.