Words of Jesus

 The Bible take 72 hours to read, cover to cover.  For those who are unwilling or unable to take on that task, perhaps it's best to focus on the words of Jesus Christ as a simple starting point.

However, the words of Jesus are spread through 9 different books of the Bible.  Even with a Red Letter Bible that will take you a while to read.

Is there something faster, you say?  Less of an up front commitment?

Well, in grand total, the King James Bible records Jesus Christ saying 42,457 words.  Some of those are the same events recorded by four different authors.  Nonfiction adult books wordcounts sit between 70,000-120,000 words, so just the life teachings of Jesus is about half of the standard non-fiction novel of today.

When we look at word frequency, the King James Bible has a total of 2,500 different words spoken by Jesus. 

I noticed that there were many words which were similar, variants on the same root word for grammatical tense, possessive form, capitalized for start of sentence, and so on (eg.believe, Believe, believed, Believest, believest, believeth, believing).  So as to simplify the word list, I combined all of these 7 words under the common, consolidated root word "believe", removed capitalization (except from proper names), and removed all possessive forms (eg. changed Father's to father), and did similarly for all other words in the list.  After all that data processing, we have a total of 1,520 unique words spoken by Jesus Christ.  From this list, I created a "word cloud", where the font size is proportional to the frequency of use (eg. the word "shall" was used 853 times, so has the largest frequency of use, and so it has the largest font size in the Word Cloud.  Here is the resulting Word Cloud:

Word Cloud for all the teachings of Jesus Christ in the King James Bible.

Click on the image to see it full size, or to download copy.  The various colours for the words is to make it more visually attractive, and make each word better separated from the neighbouring words.

Does this help summarize the teachings of Jesus?

If you want the raw data files, send me a note, you can have them for free.