Romans

Word-Count by Verses

The downloadable files show the results of a third count of the words in Romans.

In the files, a question mark by 11:6 indicates a serious textual problem, apparently a dittography of some sort, which adds 12 words here. These words are not present in the Chester Beatty papryus (ca. 200 CE), Codex Sinaiticus, or Codices C, D, F and G. In fact the text of Codex B has no other support and is rejected by Westcott and Hort, and the modern UBS edition. This is the only correction I have made in the text of Romans at this point, in our attempt to recover its presumed original form.

On the basis of prior work I predicted that we would find the number 17 to be the dominant number in Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, and Galatians. This may prove to be true. The evidence for Galatians was ambiguous with a total word count of 2210 = 17 x 26 x 5. The dominance of the number 17 in the numerical composition of Romans is shown by the total word count:

We will have to wait a bit before we can check the evidence for 1-2 Corinthians in Codex B. Reuben Swanson is working on this material now and I do not have direct access to Codex B for this text.

My conclusion at this point in time is that Codex B (Vaticanus) is rather close to the presumed original canonical form of the Greek New Testament, but nowhere as near as Codex L is for the original canonical form of the Tanakh. This is remarkable in that Codex L is removed by more than 1000 years from that original canonical form of the Tanakh, while Codex B is relatively close (removed in time by less than 300 years from the original canonical form of the Greek NT). Apparently there was no comparable scribal group in early Christianity to hand down the Greek New Testament in its canonical form (in terms of its original numerical composition), like there was for the Tanakh in Jewish history. The phenomenon of numerical composition in the Greek New Testament was forgotten early and the text itself was somewhat fluid -- growing in the course of time by accretion of words here and there, which were added for various reasons.

Duane L. Christensen