New Testament Math

When I was thinking about starting this project, I emailed Mark Goodacre and asked some very nooby questions.

One of which was, if there is digital data anywhere on the synopses of the first three gospels. In other words, is there data on what sections in each gospel correspond to which other sections (all 4 gospels + 1 Cor I guess would be cool too). After a little bit more digging I've found various sites with summaries of the major pericope correspondences, but no science-quality data.

Image via Wikipedia

This was a little frustrating as I've been planning to do some cool stuff with that data. But then I figured it was a bit lightweight to be looking for this data anyway. In addressing the synoptic problem, one of the problems I perceive (albeit as an outsider to its scholarly study) is that it is so thoroughly overlaid with preconceived ideas. A correspondence to one person may not be to another. So I need to go synopsis hunting myself, I think, with as unbiased a statistical tool as possible.

This, unfortunately, is a lot harder that producing pretty graphs from word frequencies that I've been doing for the last week. So that's why there's a gap. And there's likely to be a bigger gap until I can spend some time at the weekend playing with it more too.