Info on NT vocabulary
Jürg Buchegger
j.buchegger at datacomm.ch
Wed Nov 27 03:05:27 EST 2002
Dear Hefin,
The number of 900 is definitely too high.
I may help you with some information on the vocabulary of the corpus
paulinum (all
13 epistles, claiming to be written by Paul): My research with the help of
published
(Kennedy, Nägeli, Deissmann, Grimm-Wilke, Thayer, Gingrich,
Moulton-Milligan,
Bauer/Aland, Morgenthaler, Turner, Voelz, Rehkopf, Classen,
Liddell-Scott-Jones,
New-Documents-Series, ...) and electronic resources (TLG, DDBDP, Perseus,
...)
showed for Paul (see: "Mögliche paulinische Neologismen. Ein Beitrag zur
Erforschung
des paulinischen griechischen Wortschatzes", in: Jahrbuch für evangelikale
Theologie
15, 2001, 11-35):
- there are 87 words which are for the first time attested in the CP and
also used afterwards
- there are 7 words that up to now have only been found in the CP AND in
citations of
these pauline texts in the Churchfathers
Note that this list of words is no more than a statistical list.
It may be interesting to hear what others thought to be accurate numbers of
absolute
Neologisms in the NT (note: for the whole NT, others: just Paul):
- Grimm-Wilke (1888): 28 words "vox bibl. et eccl." and 225 words without or
with only
very few findings outside the biblical and ecclesiastical texts
- Thayer (1886/89): 767 "biblical words"
- Kennedy (1895): 550
- Deissmann (1908): not more than 50 words
- Nägeli (1904): 38 words for a-e and in Paul only!
- Morgenthaler (1958): 132 words for Paul
- Turner (1974): 15 words for Paul
- Rehkopf (1985): 80 words for the whole NT
Finally, if we take e.g. my list of roughly 95 words for Paul and
extrapolate this number for the vocabulary of the whole NT we
will not end up with 900 words. My own "calculation" (taking
into consideration a few more factors) is, that within the whole
NT we do not find more than 70 greek words, that may be
genuine NT-Neologims (by the way: "NT hapax legomena" is
a very unprecise (?) term for what we are talking about here).
Jürg Buchegger
Pfr., Dr.theol.
senior-pastor EFC Buchs, Switzerland
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list