This is very interesting. Quick question: Matthew, to take an example,
is probably ten or eleven times as large as 1 Thessalonians. How does
that affect things? (i.e., wouldnt' 1 thess. be harder than Matthew, on
average, if it were as long?)
-- Bart D. Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
On Sun, 27 Jul 1997, McKay family wrote:
> 27th July, 1997
> In 1995-96, I conducted a little experiment in which I attempted to read
> through my Greek NT without a net, whoops! I mean a lexicon.
>
> 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
>