This took the form of 20 minutes per day for 4 days a week, and was done
at the same time as supervising a group of state high school students,
who were also supposed to be reading.
It was a thrilling experience, but I must tell you that there were many
times that I felt like Hamlet reading "words! words! words!" However I
was surprised at the amount of text I could read, though at times I was
relying on the headings in my UBS 3rd edition, and also on my memory of
the English text.
This experience taught me how different some of the books are from one
another. I found Hebrews and Luke the hardest to follow, but Acts was
much easier than Luke. I wondered if it was because I read it about a
year after trying Luke, or is it an easier book to read?
With these thoughts in mind I have been doing a simple comparison of
each book, based on the number of hAPAX LEGOMENA and also the words that
only occur 3 times or less.
I was interested in comparing these two statistics because I remembered
that Bruce Metzger had said in the opening of his wonderful "Lexical
Aids for Students of NT Greek" that more than half of the words in the
NT only occur 3 or less times.
So I wondered if the books with the greatest number of hAPAX or very
nearly hAPAX would be the hardest ones to plough through. I have used
another useful book to get my figures, which is Sakae Kubo's "Reader's
Greek-English Lexicon of the NT."
I put my findings into a spreadsheet and sorted them by largest number
of hAPAX, then by largest number of words that occur 3 or less times,
and finally by number of pages in Kubo's book. (Kubo gives the meaning
of each word that occurs less than 50 times in the NT in Biblical order,
and also gives a special vocabulary section at the beginning of each
book. He defines "special vocabulary as words that occur 5 or more times
in that book, but less than 50 times.)
I realise that there are other factors that make a book hard to read
(syntax and strange-looking verb forms would top my list!), but I
discovered that my crude sorting method had quite a correlation with the
perceived difficulty for me.
The top 5 books in my spreadsheet were Acts, Luke, Hebrews, Romans,
Matthew, while the easiest books according to this method were 1 and 2
Thessalonians, Jude, Philemon, and the Johannine epistles.
Of course, some of these rare words are easier to translate than might
be expected, because they have become well known through use in
theological discussion or because they are closely related to other more
frequently occurring words.
Book hAPAX 3-1 Pages
Acts 307 744 33
Luke 217 543 54
Hebrews 121 251 16
Matthew 80 343 27
1 Corinthians 76 173 13
Revelation 70 173 14
and at the bottom of the list
1 Thessalonians 18 40 4
Jude 14 29 2
2 Thessalonians 8 25 2
Philemon 5 12 1
1-3 John 4 19 3
David McKay
music@fl.net.au