Visualizing the Authorship of the New Testament

Inspired by the folks over at the ESV and at Blogos, I submitted a data set to the Many Eyes repository showing the percentage of the New Testament written by each author.

I got my data from Tischendorf’s 8th edition Greek New Testament because it was free and publicly available — big kudos to them for making all their work so easily usable.







It occurred to me to do this because counting the Greek words has always seemed to me to be a better measurement of the New Testament document lengths than counting verses or chapters, which are less precise measurements and are contingent on the whimsy of church history rather than being an intrinsic part of the text.

Plus I vividly remember the day in seminary when I realized that Luke had written more of the New Testament than Paul had. It was an epiphany for me.

3 thoughts on “Visualizing the Authorship of the New Testament”

  1. You are absolutely correct — how embarrassing! I was so focused on the Greek word counts that I overlooked that glaring error. I’ve fixed it at Many Eyes.

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