Network Analysis of Biblical Texts
István Czachesz · Journal of Cognitive Historiography · 2018
This article presents examples of using Network Theory to analyse the text of the New Testament. We provide an introduction to the basic concepts of Network Theory and centrality measures in networks and suggest a simple method of creating word co-occurrence networks from passages. Special consideration is given to the psychological realism of the model in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world. Following a demonstration of the method on the first two verses of the Gospel of John, we compare multiple versions of a miracle story with the help of network analysis. The final part of the article demonstrates how the method can be extended to account for the knowledge of different readerships in the interpretation of the text.