New Testament Books: Length vs LDS Conference Citations

What if you took your New Testament, stretched it out tall like a bar graph, and then color coded the sides of the pages so you could compare the relative length of each book in the New Testament? You'd get a sense for how much each author wrote in each book. And although every reader of the New Testament knows that "all scripture...is profitable" (see 2 Tim 3:16), yet there are some parts that spiritually "yield...thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred" (see Mark 4:8).

How would you find which parts might yield the quotable, ponderable scriptures? One way is to look at which books are cited the most in LDS General Conference. The books cited the most could be considered the "hundred-yield" parts of the New Testament.

Below is a bar graph showing just such a comparison. On the left is the graph showing the relative length of each book in the New Testament based on the number of verses (click on picture to see larger version).

A few interesting points to notice are that Matthew and John show an increase in citations whereas Acts is noticeably diminished, relative to their lengths. 2 Timothy is noticeably larger and Revelation is about half the size in the Citations column vs the Book Length column.

In fact, if you wanted to see which books carry more than their own weight (or length) in citations, you could divide their value in the Citations graph by their value in the Book Length graph and get a ratio. Below is the list of all the books that have a ratio > 1, meaning they get cited more than what their # of verses would merit if every verse got cited equally.

So if you're looking for some good New Testament study, start with James and 2 Timothy--they're relatively short and packed with good stuff!

Book	Citation/Length
James	1.9
2 Timothy	1.9
Matthew	1.9
Ephesians	1.8
John	1.7
1 Peter	1.5
2 Peter	1.2
1 Corinthians	1.2

Coming soon...Old Testament Book Length vs Citations

Notes on information sources:

LDS Conference scripture citations are based on citations from 1971 to 2016 from the LDS Scripture Citation Index (http://scriptures.byu.edu/)

New Testament verse statistics were from online at http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/NT-Statistics-Greek.htm