Alvar Ellegård

He was professor of English at the University of Gothenburg, and a member of the academic board of the Swedish National Encyclopedia.

He is the author of a number of books and papers on English language and linguistics, including A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship (1962).

This thesis has remained an influential and frequently cited work central to the study of this aspect of the historical syntax of English.

He identifies the figure Paul of Tarsus who had a vision as corresponding to the Essene Teacher of Righteousness, the leader of the Essenes at Qumran about 150 years before the gospels, and writes that it was Paul who created Christianity through his contacts with the sect that kept the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Ellegård interprets this as evidence that the "Damascus" that is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles in fact is Qumran.

In his 1953 thesis, Ellegård showed how the use of periphrastic do progressed through different syntactic environments during Early Modern English. [ 2 ]