I told kiwiskan (she has nice photos of New Zealand) that I would post this Wordle of the Christian Gospels. I used text from the internet that had a RSV feel to it and that looked right with spot-checking, but I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the whole. Here’s the Wordle:
That the word “Jesus” really pops was no surprise to me. That the word “one” pops did surprise me. I had to look far harder than I liked to find the word “love”.
At least “hell” does not make an appearance as far as I can tell. That may be a disappointment to more conservative believers. They seem quite keen on the fiery pit, and are always declaring almost everyone is going there, excepting themselves (neat trick, that). I hope they will bear up under the disappointment. The word “evil” makes a small appearance as a consolation.
By the by … Josh at the Cognitive Turn first introduced me to Wordles through a post on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. You can read the post here.
Peter Galen Massey 
Thanks for that Peter – and the link. I think you’d find ‘love’ would have a bigger profile if you ran Wordle on the Epistles. I’ve printed the wordle off
I might give that a try, although I sense the returns are beginning to diminish on the task. I’d be more likely to try “Revelations”. Bet that one would be a hoot.
Scary!
Reblogged this on kiwissoar and commented:
An interesting exercise…
If you do one on just Jesus’ own words, it may look pretty different.
It probably would. That would take some heavy-duty editing, unless we found a good source. Another approach would be to use an online concordance and see how many search results you got for a particular word. The problem with that approach is that it would highlight the words on which we’d think to search … but not the words we didn’t. And it doesn’t answer the bigger question: how useful would those exercises be?
Since the Gospels are narrative material which tells much about where Jesus went and what he did and who he talked to. Also, remember, Jesus also told many stories filled with narrative words. This is why your Wordle has lots and lots of words about narrative, especially verbs, (went, speak, heard, going, took, answered.) It isn’t that Jesus wasn’t using theological words (love, sin, forgive, kingdom, baptize,grace, etc) but Christ’s comments are a tiny portion compared to all the narrative descriptions of all the people doing things,
Yes, I’ve seen the same thing in some of the Wordles I tried on other narratives. Character names are prominent, no surprise, and the size of the names in the Wordle gives you a pretty good idea of the importance of the characters to the story. For my own stories, I’m particularly interested in what characters do with their eyes while they are speaking, so the words “look” and “looked” show up a lot. Wordle seems to automatically exclude prepositions, conjunctions, and articles, which is sensible.
All that said, I find the result for the gospels interesting while not being sure it is significant. Since we’re used to getting the “meaty stuff” when the old and new testament lessons are read in church, passages on which a sermon could be preached, we (or at least I) overlook the frame. The Wordle pulled that out. I asked in another post if Wordle is “genius” or “gimmick”. That’s a glib formula I admit. The truth in this case is that Wordle seems to be a handy way to look at a text differently and see if anything interesting jumps out. They can also please the eye. I chose earth tones for my color, a clear curved typeface, keep all the words on a horizontal orientation, and clicked the button until I got a shape that was harmonious. A fair amount of editorializing shows up in that alone. Thanks for stopping by. P.
I feel consoled that the more God-fearing, negative aspects are not prominent.
I have relatives, seminary trained, who will go back to the original Greek of the gospels as well as the gospel writers and how their society would understand hell, and make an argument that Jesus only thought of hell metaphorically not as an actual place. This is my belief because a god who would inflict infinite punishment for finite sins does not deserve our worship. Plenty of folks would say I’m wrong. I guess I’ll find out someday, but I’m hoping not too soon.
I agree completely with you. I basically see the bible as being allegorical, and although I am not religious, I can see some beauty and truth in it. And if we were to take what was in the bible literally, slavery apparently would still be okay, since it states that it is okay to own slaves, and polygamy would be okay too.
When I ask my clergy relative to answer a question based on the bible, he invariably answers, “Well, it depends on which verse you want to emphasize.” The literalists do this too. They just don’t think they do.
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Thanks, ORC.