STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PERFECTLY TAUGHT JEW
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PERFECTLY TAUGHT JEW
According to the KJV, Paul accounts for almost as many possible cross references with the Apocrypha as all the other Evangelists combined. He who was “brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers” (Acts 22:3) has 56 references, more than two and a half times those of even the Gospel to the Jews.
Using the original Greek word counts[1] the Epistles of Paul account for just 27% of the New Testament, yet the Perfectly Taught Jew accounts for 49% of the cross-references with Apocrypha. Cross-references to Apocrypha thus occur 2.5 times as frequently in Paul’s writings than for all the other Evangelists. Apparently, cross-references with Apocrypha are a core part of the Perfectly Taught Jew’s writing.
One might wonder if the ‘real’ Paul was less focused on Apocrypha, so let’s check that. Those Epistles widely seen as pseudepigraphic (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus) account for seven cross-references to Apocrypha. Those whose authorship is widely debated (2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Colossians) account for six. The Epistle to the Hebrews (“who wrote the epistle, truly only God knows”—Origen), accounts for six.[2]
On the other hand, the seven Epistles that most scholars accept as written by Paul himself (Galatians, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians) account for two-thirds of the cross-references: 37 of them, twice as many as the seven whose authorship are debated.
Matthew’s Gospel and the Pauline Epistles have cross-references to Apocrypha at the rate of 1 per 714 words. For the rest of the New Testament, the rate is 1 per 2225 words. The Gospel to the Jews and the Perfectly Taught Jew seem to reference Apocrypha 3.1 times as often.
According to the KJV, between Matthew’s Gospel to the Jews, Paul the Perfectly Trained Jew, and Luke (someone who learned his Christianity from Paul; and including both Luke’s Gospel (which combined with Matthew accounts for 36 of 41 Gospel cross references) and Acts), we have 98 of the 115 cross-references to Apocrypha.
[1] From www.catholic-resources.org/Bible/NT-Statistics-Greek.htm
[2] Using the categories described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_epistles.
