25 July 2022

The latest blog entry gave a comparison between the research of the Wuppertal project and my work concerning the Gospel of Matthew. Here I give some further summary that is based only on my work, after some updates by the help of the Wuppertal project.

Also, this entry is a kind of technological update on exploiting some nice features of the jquery.terminal library that offers an advanced terminal for website embedding.

I created a table on the quotations appearing in Matthew. The rows show all quotations (47 items). Thirty-one of them can be automatically found with the getrefs algorithm. By clicking on a blue link, the bibref program shows how the getrefs algorithm finds all possible matches.

Also, the terminal can be directly used via the keyboard. For example, commands like lookup KJV Isaiah 7:14 or lookup LXX Isaiah 7:14 or lookup SBLGNT Matthew 1:23 could be issued. A new feature in this version that a new edition of the New Testament is available: the BHPGNT. That is, a similar command lookup BHPGNT Matthew 1:23 works too.

Matthew is the second book of the New Testament that quotes the most passages from the Old Testament. The other book is Romans (with 50 quotations). Romans quotes from 13 different books (Habakkuk, Isaiah, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Genesis, Malachi, Exodus, Hosea, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Joel, I_Kings, Proverbs) – Matthew refers to 12 ones (Isaiah, Micah, II_Samuel, Hosea, Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Exodus, Leviticus, Genesis, Zechariah, Daniel). Altogether they quote from 18 books.

In the table above 16 lines do not have getrefs chunks. This is more than 1/3 of the rows. This shows that a fuzzy variant of the getrefs algorithm would improve the outputs substantially.