Paper:
Language: English:

Network Analysis of the Four Gospels and the Catechism of the Catholic Church

Hajime Murai and Akifumi Tokosumi

Department of Value and Decision Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1 Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8552, Japan

Received: December 4, 2006

Accepted: May 7, 2007

Keywords: network analysis, text mining hermeneutics, the Bible, synopsis

Journal ref: Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol.11, No.7 pp. 772-779, 2007

Abstract

There are many religions, such as Christianity, that have sought to spread their messages and have subsequently created a collection of documents. However, as the literature grows, it becomes more problematic to interpret any single text and perceive how it relates to other documents. This situation is common in other areas of human activity, not just religions.

In this paper, we propose a method of Synoptic Network Analysis, to represent the relationships between multiple overlapping texts as a network, and to analyze the structure and semantics of the texts by clustering the network. This method is applied to the four traditional Christian Gospels and the Catechism of the Catholic Church in order to extract the main messages common to these Gospels, to highlight the dogmatic characteristics of each Gospel and the Catechism and to compare those results.

Unlike traditional literature-based approaches, Synoptic Network Analysis is a scientific method that incorporates falsifiability and replicability. The method makes it possible to scientifically evaluate various literature-based hypotheses.

Reference

[1] R. Kasser, “The Gospel of Judas, National Geographic,” 2006.

[2] K. Aland, “Synopsis of the four Gospels revised standard version,” the United Bible Societies, 1982.

[3] M. Satoh, “The Japanese Synopsis of the Gospels in Colors,” Iwanami, 2005.

[4] M. Miyake, H. Akama, M. Nakagawa, and N. Makoshi, “The Computed Synoptic Table – Tele-Synopsis for Biblical Research,” Proceedings of ACH/ALLC, pp. 152-154, 2005.

[5] “A statistical approach to the synoptic problem,”
http://www.davegentile.com/synoptics/main.html

[6] G. A. Miller, “WordNet: a lexical database for English,” Communications of the ACM, Vol.38, pp. 39-41, 1995.

[7] M. E. J. Newman and M. Girvan, “Finding and evaluating community structure in networks,” Physical Review E, Vol.69, 2004.

[8] R. Lempel and S. Moran, “SALSA The Stochastic Approach for Link Structure Analysis,” ACM Transactions on Information systems, pp. 131-160, 2001.

[9] L. Mengxjong, “Progress In Documentation The Complexities of Citation Practice: A Review of Citation Studies,” Journal of Documentation, Vol.49, pp. 370-408, 1993.

[10] H. Murai and A. Tokosumi, “A Network Analysis of Hermeneutic Documents Based on Bible Citations,” XXVII Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1565-1570, 2005.

[11] J. Paul II, “Catechism of the Catholic Church,”
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc/index.htm ,
1992.