What to read after John’s Gospel and Hapaxlegomena

Update: here is a Google sheet with this data and more that you can sort in different ways based on whether you want to included or exclude hapaxlegomena. Also you can choose whether to exclude them relative to the book, GNT, LXX, or the whole Greek Bible.

Yesterday¹ I wrote about what books would be easiest to read after having only read John’s Gospel or 1st John.

This got me wondering about the number of hapaxlegomena in each book. The following table is ordered by the percentage of words found in a given book that are not present also in John’s Gospel and occur more than once vs the number of words in the book. As a formula it would look like this.

• (Words in book - hapax words - words also in John)/ word count of book

It is interesting that of the 999 lemmata in John’s Gospel, 368 (or 37%) of them are hapaxlegomena. Thus, with digital reading tools or footnotes we really only need to learn 600 words to read John’s Gospel. Yet another reason that it is a good place to start.

The truly surprising thing is how different the order of books is once the hapax words are removed from the calculation. Judges was the third row on the table, but it has dropped to row 16. More NT books occur earlier in the list as well.

What does this mean from a pedagogical perspective?

Hapax words could be clearly marked and glosses and parsing information provided to students via footnotes or the like. Of course too many footnoted words in a single sentence would be a barrier to fluent reading so that needs to be considered as well.

As long as these words are clearly marked so the student doesn’t have to wonder whether they should known them or not, then the following order could be a reasonable program for reading through the Greek Bible. This order would provide exposure to huge amount of text while also maximizing comprehensibility.