Philo, LXX and the New Testament

This is a posting that deals with the possibility of an automatic generated comparison of Greek words of different corpora, Philo, NT and the LXX in particular.

The reason for taking up this subject, is my experiences with the compiling of a Philo concordance (cf. http://webster.hibo.no/alu/seksjon/krl/kaare/filon). During the project, my co-editors (Prof. Peder Borgen and Prof. Roald Skarsten) and I gathered several other electronic texts, lemmatised and tagged, in order to improve our own work on Philo.

I discovered that the BETA-code was a convenient format to use in a comparison of different corpora since the code is pretty unambiguous. I designed a script, a program, by myself that compared the Philo-concordance and the New Testament texts. The results were by no way surprising, but confirmed some trends that are well-known, such as the word correspondance between The Letter to the Hebrews and Philo.

I sent the list to the Mellen Press, cf. www.mellenpress.com that accepted it for publication in 2003 (A Comparison of Greek Words in Philo and the New Testament).

What the list is good for is first of all that it forms a starting point for comparing ideas and words between Philo and the New Testament.

Now, other comparison and even more advanced ones are easily at hand. I have wondered if a similar comparison should be undertaken, pulling in the Septuagint (LXX). Is it probably fair to say that an experienced scholar who knows all three texts is not be in much need of such a list. For New Testament scholars the list would be welcomed I guess, since it is urgent for these scholars to see the correspondence between these features in order to evaluate Philo’s possible and indirect influence on the New Testament also independently of the LXX.