Abstract
There has been much research on the nature of dialogues in the Bible. While the research literature abounds with qualitative analyses on these dialogues, they are rarely corroborated on statistics from the entire text. In this article, we leverage a corpus of annotated direct speech in the New Testament, as well as recent advances in automatic speaker and listener identification, to present a quantitative study on dialogue structure in the Gospels. The contributions of this article are three-fold. First, we quantify a variety of features that are widely used in characterizing dialogue structure—including dialogue length, turn length, and the initiation and conclusion of a dialogue—and show how they distinguish between different Gospels. Second, we compare our statistics with qualitative comments in the New Testament research literature, and extend them to cover the entirety of the Gospels. Most significantly, we gauge the feasibility of applying our approach to other literary works, by measuring the amount of errors that would be introduced by automatically identified dialogues, speakers and listeners.
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Notes
Preface to the NET Bible (https://bible.org/netbible/index.htm?pre.htm).
NET Bible Principles of Translation (https://bible.org/netbible/index.htm?pre.htm).
The list is: Mark 1:23–27, 1:35–38, 2:1–12, 2:13–17, 2:18–22, 2:23–28, 3:1–6, 3:22–30, 3:30–35, 4:10–12, 6:1–6, 7:1–23, 7:24–30, 8:11–12, 8:27–30, 8:31–33, 9:9–13, 9:28–29, 9:33–37, 9:38–39, 10:2–12, 10:13–16, 10:17–27, 10:34–50, 10:46–52, 11:15–17, 11:20–25, 11:27–33, 12:13–17, 12:18–27, 12:28–34, 12:35–40, 12:41–44, 13:1–2, 14:3–9.
The passages are John 3:2–10; 4:7–26; 6:25–42; 7:15–35; 8:12–28; 10:24–34; 13:31–14:31.
At p < 0.001 by McNemar's test.
At p < 0.001 by McNemar's test.
At p < 0.001 by McNemar's test for all cases.
By the chi-squared test, the differences are statistically significant when comparing John with Matthew (p < 0.05), Mark (p < 0.05) and Luke (p < 0.05).
By the chi-squared test, the differences are statistically significant when comparing John with Matthew (p < 0.05), Mark (p < 0.05) and Luke (p < 0.05).
In Acts 2:14–36, 3:12–26, and 10:34–43, respectively.
The differences with Cycle I and Cycle II are both statistically significant, at p < 0.05 with the chi-squared test.
The differences with Matthew, Mark and Luke are statistically significant, at p < 0.05 by t test.
The list includes Acts 1:16–22, 2:14–36, 38–39, 3:12–26, 4:8–12, 19–20, 5:29–32, 5:35–39, 7:2–53, 10:34–43, 11:5–17, 13:16–41, 14:15–17, 15:7–11, 15:13–21, 17:22–31, 19:25–27, 19:35–40, 20:18–35, 22:1–21, 24:2–8, 24:10–21, 25:24–27, 26:2–23, 27:21–26, 28:17–20.
Namely, Mark 4:11–32 and 13:5–37, as cited in Fast (2002: 28).
The differences approach statistical significance, at p = 0.072 for Matthew and p = 0.075 for Luke by the t test.
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We gratefully acknowledge support from the CityU Internal Funds for External Grant Schemes (project #9678104).
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Yeung, C.Y., Lee, J. Dialogue analysis: a case study on the New Testament. Lang Resources & Evaluation 53, 603–623 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-019-09461-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-019-09461-9