Homilies on the Gospel of St. John and the Epistle to the Hebrews

NPNF (V1-14)St. Chrysostom345I have made such an examination with some care, and will here give a summary of its results. It isto be borne in mind that this Epistle is much shorter than the collective writings of St. Paul, or St.Luke, or of the other New Testament writers taken together. By a careful estimate of the actuallength of these four groups it is found that, taking the longest as the standard, in order to determinethe relative use of any word in them, it is necessary to multiply the number of its occurrences inSt. Luke by 1.57, in St. Paul by 1.86, in Hebrews by 11.56. The results may in many instancesprove fallacious. Any writer may use a word several times, even in a short passage, which he wouldnot have used again had his writing been greatly extended; or he may not use a particular wordonce in twenty pages, when he will employ it several times in the twenty-first. Such facts must beborne in mind, but the above process seems to be the only means of making a comparative statementin figures; and when it is applied to a large number of words, and especially to whole groups ofwords which correspond to certain classes of ideas, the general result must have a decided bearingupon the question of authorship.It has often been noticed that the number of words peculiar to any New Testament writer is anindex of the number freely at his command. Peculiar words, it is true, are often required by peculiarityof subject, and may sometimes be what is called accidental. Still, when the number of them in anywriter is unusually large, the fact has its value, and such words do abound in the writings of St.Luke and in the Epistle to the Hebrews above all others. 2656 No great importance perhaps shouldbe attached to this point; yet as it is often brought forward, the exact facts should be ascertained.Excluding words occurring only in quotations from the LXX (which can have no bearing upon thecharacteristics of the writer), and also excluding words which depend on doubtful readings, thenumber of words found in the New Testament only in the Gospel of St. Luke is 249, in the Acts414, in both taken together 724; the similar number in the much shorter Epistle to the Hebrews is147, while even the Apocalypse, with all its peculiar subjects and imagery, has but 116, and noneof the other books (except Matthew 114) reach as high as 100. This suggests that the writer of thisEpistle was like St. Luke in having at his command a peculiarly rich vocabulary. But if the factsbe looked at in another way, and the comparative length of the various books taken into consideration,a different result is reached. St. Luke’s Gospel has one peculiar word to every 9.76 lines; Acts, oneto every 5.77; Hebrews, one to 4.45; but 1 Timothy has one to every three lines; 2 Timothy, oneto 3.22; Titus, one to 2.97; James, one to 3.5; and so on with several of the shorter epistles. Theresult of such statistics appears to depend much upon how they are manipulated. Nevertheless, inno book of nearly equal, or of greater length, is the proportion so large as in this Epistle, except inthe Acts. If the writings of various authors be taken collectively,—St. Luke has 724 peculiar words = 1 to every 6.66 lines.St. Paul has 777 peculiar words = 1 to every 5.25 lines.Hebrews has 147 peculiar words = 1 to every 4.45 lines.St. John has 244 peculiar words = 1 to every 13.46 lines.All others taken together have 378 peculiar words = 1 to every 11.38 lines.On the whole, then, the first impression of every reader is confirmed: St. Paul, St. Luke, andthe author of Hebrews are alike distinguished from the other New Testament writers by thecomparative richness of their vocabulary; yet, in view of the peculiar subjects treated in this Epistle,this fact has less significance than it might be entitled to under other circumstances.2656See Thayer’s Grimm’s N.T. Lexicon , Appendix iv. pp. 698–710, for lists of words peculiar to each New Testament writer.509