Jesus of Nazareth is very likely the most influential man to ever walk the Earth. In the ever-shrinking world of the 21st century, basically every man, woman, and child has at least heard of him. Whether or not someone believes he is the Christ, Jesus has had at least some impact on the way each person thinks. With such a huge influence on the world, you’d think this man would have left a great deal of teaching and evidence behind him. This, however, is not the case. In fact, the Bible is the only accepted source of Jesus’ words and teaching that exists. Though there are four separate accounts of his life included in this text, these “gospels”, as they are called, offer only a very small account of his words and actions.
In our modern age that allows a great deal of storytelling and publishing by even the most inexperienced of writers, many fictional accounts of the life of Jesus have arisen. Though some are written with an attempt at historical authenticity and others are blatantly fictitious, any new accounts of Jesus are bound to create interest and ideas. Many of these stories seek to fill in the large blanks that are left by the gospel accounts, and with no accepted truth in regards to a great chunk of his life, these fictitious accounts can make anyone question the truth.
The Words of the Lord Project is a plunge into the research of the linguistics of the biblical Jesus. It’s an attempt to discuss the philology of Jesus’ words in the only accepted source we have. This source, however, is certainly not perfect. With many changes through translation and rendition, the modern Bible is a book with many different versions and almost no certainty about genuineness. The only way to truly research and discuss the Bible, then, is to look at all of the versions (or at least as many as possible) separately. Therefore, this project will look at the number of words of Jesus in each chapter of each gospel in the different translations of the Bible. These numbers will then hopefully lead to more interesting discoveries into the head and person of Jesus of Nazareth.
A special thanks goes to BibleGateway.com, ChristianAnswers.net, CCEL.org, the creators of Microsoft Word (especially those who worked on the Copy, Paste, and Word Count functions), Dr. Louis Klopsch for printing the first red-letter Bible, my grandma for giving me my first Bible, and Jesus for saying these words and inspiring everything we do.
