Ben C Smith

Does somebody have access to, or know where I might find online, standard Greek word counts for the NT books, especially the Pauline epistles?

Thanks.

Ben.

Chris Weimer

It changes, ya know...

PS - I think Peter Kirby has the numbers. He did some statistical analyses on the books earlier, but it was at the now defunct Ebla.

RED DAVE

This guy seems to have a lot of data:

http://www.supakoo.com/rick/ricoblog...Testament.aspx

RED DAVE

Julian

Here is what I get from my NA27 database.

Word length sorted by count:
Luke 19482
Acts 18450
Matthew 18346
John 15635
Mark 11304
Revelation 9851
Romans 7111
1 Corinthians 6830
Hebrews 4953
2 Corinthians 4477
Ephesians 2422
Galatians 2230
1 John 2141
James 1742
1 Peter 1684
Philippians 1629
1 Timothy 1591
Colossians 1582
1 Thessalonians 1481
2 Timothy 1238
2 Peter 1099
2 Thessalonians 823
Titus 659
Jude 461
Philemon 335
2 John 245
3 John 219

Books sorted by number of letters (these are unicode counts from mysql, not sure how accurate they are, but I suspect they are perfect) :
Luke 455762
Acts 452190
Matthew 427472
John 341387
Mark 267693
Revelation 218664
Romans 163221
1 Corinthians 155404
Hebrews 123989
2 Corinthians 105495
Ephesians 57128
Galatians 52423
1 John 45508
1 Peter 42769
James 41747
1 Timothy 41449
Philippians 37847
Colossians 37489
1 Thessalonians 35317
2 Timothy 30625
2 Peter 28615
2 Thessalonians 19359
Titus 17462
Jude 12157
Philemon 7440
2 John 5421
3 John 5286

If any other stats are needed, I do have handy access to an excellent NA27 database, so let me know.

Julian

Ben C Smith

Great! Many thanks, Dave and Julian.

(You guys are great, no matter what everybody else always says about you. )

Ben.

neilgodfrey

how does one arrive at a definitive list when there is variation across the different manuscripts?

Ben C Smith

There is no definitive list. One always has to choose a text, whether it be an extant text from an actual manuscript or a reconstruction such as the NA 27 (which is what Julian used for his numbers). But, really, the word counts are not going to change that much between the various texts. Close enough is good enough for the basic statistical work such word counts usually go toward. Only if one is going to make a big deal over which word falls in the precise middle of a certain book or such like is the exact word count going to matter.

Ben.