The New Testament:
Word Count by Verses

General Remarks

We are attempting to publish an accurate count of the number of words in every book of the New Testament, verse by verse. We are checking and rechecking every single number as far as humanly possible. Every word count posted here has been checked a minimum of two times, usually three. We invite others out there to correct any errors that remain. The data is presented in a spreadsheet format so that the precise errors can be located and readily corrected.

We have merely counted the number of words in Codex B (Vaticanus)— as published in Reuben Swanson's New Testament Greek Manuscripts (William Carey International University Press, Pasadena) ("NTGM"). This is not necessarily the number of words in the original codex. We do not have a critical edition of Codex B, and what is now in the process of being published will not adequately serve the academic community to meet that need.

At this point, our evidence indicates that 172 words were lost in the editing process of the Synoptic Gospels alone in the published edition of NTGM. These figures are from Reuben Swanson himself, since his original count was made from Codex B before he began to publish Codex B within a larger collection of such texts arranged in parallel lines. We are now counting the words of the base line of his published work, which presumeably is Codex B. Nonetheless, a significant number of words have apparently been lost!

I have discussed this matter with Reuben Swanson and he has agreed to recheck the data. We do not know how those 172 words were lost, nor do we know at this point in time how to find them.

To do the task of numerical composition in the Greek New Testament we must have a critical edition of Codex Vaticanus (supplemented with Codex Sinaiticus for those parts of the manuscript of Codex B no longer in existence). My suggestion is that we "publish" a preliminary form of that critical edition immediately— by posting it on the internet for anyone to use, as they choose, absolutely free. As the scholarly community makes use of that text in various research projects, we will ultimately locate and correct the errors— within the limits of the human condition.

How can we begin, much less criticize, work in the numerical analysis of the Greek New Testament, if the proper tools with which to do that very research are simply not available? Yet the preliminary counts suggest that significant discoveries await us in this field!

It is impossible to do the research we want to do on the numerical composition of the Greek New Testament with the standard critical editions currently available in the academic community.

In our opinion, Nestle-Aland's Novum Testamentum Graece ("NTG"), in any of its many editions, is A WORTHLESS TEXT with which to work. It is not even possible to get a meaningful count of the words in that modern version of the ancient text, because of the inconsistent use of bracketed (i.e., doubtful) words between the various editions of that text. At least for the Hebrew Bible, we have a more or less accurate critical edition of a single, real "canonical" text, which is the oldest and best such text available. In the NTG, we have only an eclectic creation of the academic community (commonly referred to as the "Textus Receptus"), which is far removed from the original numerical (i.e, canonical) composition of the Greek NT. We need something comparable to BHS for the Greek New Testament, which in this particular instance would be based on Codex B (Vaticanus). At the moment, the publication of Reuben Swanson will supply a temporary need as we take the next steps toward a critical edition of Codex B (Vaticanus), for the Greek New Testament

Incidentally, we also need ready access to Codex Aleppo for the Hebrew Bible as well, for comparison with Codex L, on the internet, available to the scholarly community at no cost whatsoever.

It is not an easy task to count the words in a text like this, accurately. Moreover, even when we have achieved a reasonably accurate count, we still must ask the question, What have we counted?

We hope to reconstruct the presumed original canonical form of that text— a text we have reason to believe was numerically composed in the first century CE to be the "Word of God"— by consciously weaving God's holy name symbolically into the very fabric of the text.

Duane Christensen