Research suggests that for optimal learning efficiency, you should focus on reading material that is considered to be comprehensible input. Which simply means, you should be able to recognise at least 98% of the words on a page. Why is this?

Consider how many pages per hour you can read when you recognize most of the words on the page. Alternatively, consider how fast you can read when you only understand 80% of the words on a page. If you can increase the number of pages you can read per minute, not only will your reading experience be more enjoyable, but you will improve the rate at which you become comfortable reading the language.

But how do we count ‘words’?

Mounce introduces new students to the activity of memorising New Testament vocabulary as follows:

“These 319 words account for 110,425 word occurrences, or 79.92% of the total word count, almost four out of five. …. The point is that if you learn these 319 words well, you can read the bulk of the New Testament. I think it is counterproductive at this point to learn more, unless you really like doing things like that. Your time is better spent reading the Bible or learning grammar.”

(William D. Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar, 3d; (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 16.)

While I appreciate the attempt to efficiently focus the student on the most common words, these numbers assume that if a student can read the word ἐσθίω (eat) with relative ease, that the student can also comfortably read the past tense-form ἔφαγον. It assumes that if the student memorised the flashcard ὁράω (see) that they will comfortably recognise the forms εἶδον and ὄψομαι. These two examples demonstrate the limitations we have with measuring reading speed and reading comprehension. Just because a student can read one form of a word, does not mean they can comfortably recognise all alternate forms. In spite of this, textbooks and software products that popular in seminaries today teach and measure vocabulary frequency using the root form of a word.

Order Chapters of the Bible by Word Frequency

Each first year textbook requires the student to learn a different amount of vocabulary. Mounce covers the 313 most common words, Duff covers the 600 most common words, and my count of Black finds 503 words. Thankfully the vocabulary set chosen doesn’t overly impact the end result in terms of ordering the chapters of the bible by the number of words a student should recognise. The vocabulary set from David Allan Black has been chosen here.

• Chapters in the New Testament ordered by Vocabulary Frequency PDF PNG
• Chapters in the Old Testament (Septuagint) ordered by Vocabulary Frequency PDF PNG
• Chapters in the Bible ordered by Vocabulary Frequency PDF PNG

Unfortunately there are no individual chapters in the New Testament that approach that 98% vocabulary level.

Order Bible Passages by Word Frequency

So the next step in my journey to discover biblical text that comes closer to that 98% level was to consider analysing individual stories and passages in the bible. To do this, chapters can be divided up into smaller sections using section headings (we used the same headings used on this site), and skipped any section that was only one or two verses long. Here is the result. You can download this list to print or share, our only hope is that it may help and encourage people to dig into the biblical text of the New Testament.

• Download Stories and Passages in the New Testament ordered by Vocabulary Frequency PDF PNG