The distinct emotional flavor of Gnostic writings from the early Christian era

More than 500,000 scored words in 83 documents were used to conclude that it is possible to identify the source of documents (proto-orthodox Christian versus early Gnostic) on the basis of the emotions underlying the words. Twenty-seven New Testament works and seven Gnostic documents (including the gospels of Thomas, Judas, and Mary Magdalene]) were scored with the Dictionary of Affect in Language. Patterns of emotional word use focusing on eight types of extreme emotional words were employed in a discriminant function analysis to predict source. Prediction was highly successful (canonical r = .81, 97% correct identification of source). When the discriminant function was tested with more than 30 additional Gnostic and Christian works including a variety of translations and some wisdom books, it correctly classified all of them. The majority of the predictive power of the function (97% of all correct categorizations, 70% of the canonical r2) was associated with the preferential presence of passive and passive/pleasant words in Gnostic documents.