The Gospel of Mark

Word Count by Verses

There is a significant difference in the total word count for Mark conducted by Reuben Swanson and myself. He has agreed to check things out. The word count he did for the Synoptic Gospels predates the publication of his New Testament Greek Manuscripts and was done directly from the text itself. At this point, we cannot explain the difference between his count of 11,047 and mine of 10,989— a difference of 58 words. Even if I succeed in getting an accurate word count for the text in Swanson's book, this does not necessarily mean that we have in fact accurately counted the words in Codex B!

Counting the words in the Greek New Testament is more difficult than one might first imagine. The standard Greek NT is worthless for our purposes. There's not even a way to count the words there with any degree of accuracy from one edition to another. The powers that be in this curious world of academia keep changing the brackets around words they consider "doubtful." They have unfortunately lost sight of the canonical injunction of Deut 4:2— "You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it." At least Swanson is taking us back toward the original canonical form of the Greek New Testament, according to its numerical composition in the 2nd half of the 1st century CE.

I found an interesting case of "dittography" in Swanson's book, with the data for the first line of Mark 11:28 appearing on both pp. 186 and 187. There is also a curious "haplography" of sorts with a missing page for Mark 10:11-15 The page for Mark 9:2-4 appears a second time here. That's the reason for the question marks at that point in the Excel spreadsheet. Swanson is mailing that missing page to me. The numbers for Mark 10:11-15 are tentative, as they are taken from the Novum Testamentum Graece.

In due course, we should be able to locate the error on my part (or perhaps in the published version of Codex B in NTGM. The situation we face here is a bit parallel to that of making the assumption that BHS, a published edition of Codex L for the Tanakh, is in fact identical to it. We already know that it is not--though it is apparently getting closer and closer to it as each new error is located and corrected. Casper Labuschagne and I have already found errors in matters of detail in Deuteronomy and now in the Book of the Twelve (Minor Prophets). The same goes for Aron Doton's recent publication, Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia. Calling it Codex L does not make it identical with Codex L.

I continue to have confidence in Reuben's original count and so I consider the attached reports to be "preliminary" in nature. For the moment, we will continue to go with the numbers reported by Reuben Swanson for the Synoptic Gospels that launched this whole episode in the Greek New Testament.

I welcome the efforts of colleagues out there to help me correct the errors in the word counts of each book of the Bible as they appear on our website. In time we will have an invaluable research tool at our finger tips— an accurate word count and a numerical analysis of the text of the entire Bible, which take us a significant step toward the recovery of the original cananonical form of the biblical text.

Duane Christensen