Reconstructing the History of Modern English Bible Versions: An Application of Phylogenetic Inference Techniques

Abstract

For my thesis, I have applied a set of techniques from computational biology, known as phylogenetic inference, to study the history of English Bible versions. Phylogenetic inference tries to construct an evolutionary tree to describe the ancestral relationships between species without any knowledge of the ancestral species. It predicts the evolutionary relationships using only the observable characteristics of the extant species as input data. Many different versions of the Bible exist in English, and many of these versions are revisions of previous English Bible versions. My hypothesis is that it is possible to predict the history of English Bible versions using only the texts of the most recent versions as input. In this thesis, I present four different methods of phylogenetic inference and demonstrate that they can be used to accurate predict the history of six English Bible versions.