SQJ Taipei

The people over at the English Standard Version Blog have used a new online data visualization site to scan through the data provided by the text of the New Testament to reveal an interesting map of all of the social networks in the New Testament. This picture is from their blog and you can click on it to see the big version.

Of course it isn’t surprising that Jesus is the common denominator… and I guess if you are familiar with the text of the NT, you won’t really find any of this surprising… but it is interesting to look at and I enjoyed looking at this map and the relationships and thinking of the scriptures (the data) that brought about this particular visualization. Here’s some things that came to my mind:

Paul… usually introduces himself by referring to Jesus.

Peter, James and John were the apostles most often mentioned so they are more prominent and closer to Jesus on the map.

The map ends up bunching the apostles in the lower left quadrant and the Old Testament people in the top left. Interesting to think of the times Jesus is mentioned with Moses or David or Jacob or Abraham… and how many times he quotes Isaiah.

It doesn’t take into consideration the importance of the relationships in the text… for example, Jesus mentions “The sign of Jonah” which is a HUGELY IMPORTANT part of Jesus’ teaching and his understanding of the authenticity of the Jonah story and of his own knowledge of his resurrection… but Jonah just gets one little line and a tiny dot in this map.

If you go to the Many Eyes website where the date is crunched… you’ll find that you can manipulate the image in various ways to help you observe the data. In fact, I think that is why the points end up in clear quadrants (apostles, OT, etc) because the map at the Many Eyes site doesn’t bunch the data that way when you run it yourself.