Fifteen in Acts 7, Five in Acts 22

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Sanhedrin,” “Pharisees,” “Sadducees,” “Ananias,” “Felix, Antonius,” “Caesarea Maritima,” “Antipatris,” “Tarsus.”
• Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP) — “Citizenship, Roman,” “Roman Law and Legal System,” “Roman Military,” “Prison, Prisoner,” “Rhetoric” (on the ἀπολογία as a form).
• New International Dictionary of NT Theology & Exegesis — ἀπολογία, ἀνάστασις, συνέδριον, ἀναθεματίζω, κράτιστος.
• Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson (Baker, 2007) — the Acts chapter, for Acts 23:5 and Exodus 22:27/28.
• These were not consulted for the measurements below. The measurements were run on the text files named in the footer.

Every page on this shelf states its versification offset, including the pages where the answer is that there is none. On a New Testament book the answer is stronger than that: there is no second ancient column for the numbers to be offset from. There is no Hebrew Acts and no Septuagint Acts. The two scripture columns here are the Greek New Testament and the ESV, and every chapter-and-verse number on this page means the same verse in both.

Counted off disk, this particular passage is clean.

The four verse numbers absent from the SBLGNT text of Acts are 8:37, 15:34, 24:7 and 28:29. That was not read off a list; it was found by walking the MorphGNT file and asking which numbers never appear. None of the four is in this study. One of them, 24:7, falls one chapter later, in the hearing this passage is being sent to. A fifth difference is a division rather than an omission: SBLGNT Acts 19 ends at verse 40 where the English prints 19:41, which is why the whole-book totals differ by more than four.

⚠️ What this page did not check. No manuscript, apparatus or edition was consulted on why any of those four is absent. The claim here is only that the printed SBLGNT does not carry them and the traditional English numbering does. Whether a verse is ‘original’ is a question about manuscripts, and no manuscript was examined for this page. There is a second numbering wrinkle this page does report because it bears directly on Stage 4: the verse Acts 23:5 quotes is numbered Exodus 22:27 in the Septuagint and Exodus 22:28 in the English, because Greek Exodus counts the chapter one behind from verse 1 — and so does the Masoretic Hebrew, which numbers it 22:27 too. The offset here is between the ancient numbering and the English, not between Hebrew and Greek. Both numbers are printed wherever the verse appears on this page.

Measured: Ῥωμαῖος occurs twelve times in the Greek New Testament, eleven of them in Acts, and five of the twelve are in these two chapters (22:25, 22:26, 22:27, 22:29, 23:27). ἀκατάκριτος occurs twice in the New Testament — Acts 16:37 and Acts 22:25 — and not once in the 30,637 verse units of Greek Old Testament held here. πολιτεία occurs twice: Acts 22:28 and Ephesians 2:12. μαστίζω, προτείνω and ἀνετάζω — the three verbs of the flogging preparation — occur once, once and twice, and all four occurrences are inside this study.

Borrowed, and flagged as borrowed: That the lex Iulia de vi publica forbade the scourging of a Roman citizen; that citizenship could be bought and that the traffic in it was notorious under Claudius; that a chiliarchos is the Greek for a tribunus militum commanding a cohort; that the Antonia fortress overlooked the temple court by a stair — all of that is from the reference works and from Roman historians not held on this disk. Nothing in the sentence above was measured here.

What the text supplies without help: the tribune paid πολλοῦ κεφαλαίου for what Paul says he was born with, and the narrative does not comment. The word for the fear that follows is ἐφοβήθη (22:29), and it occurs exactly twice in these two chapters, both of the same officer — here, and at 23:10 when he thinks the council will pull Paul apart.

Measured, and this is the cleanest zero on the page: δεξιολάβος (23:23) occurs once in the Greek New Testament and not once in the 30,637 verse units of Greek Old Testament held here. So do συνωμοσία (23:13) and πραιτώριον (23:35) in the Old Testament column. There is no second occurrence in either corpus to check any of them against.

⚠️ How that zero was produced, precisely. It is a screen over word forms, normalised and stem-matched, across every CATSS file held here. A zero means the string does not occur in the Greek Old Testament this shelf holds. It does not mean the word did not exist — δεξιολάβος is attested in later Byzantine military writers, which is exactly why the versions disagree, and none of those writers is on this disk.

Measured: ἀναθεματίζω occurs four times in the Greek New Testament. Three are in this chapter — 23:12, 23:14, 23:21, all of the same forty men — and the fourth is Mark 14:71, where Peter begins to invoke a curse on himself in the high priest’s courtyard. In the Greek Old Testament held here the verb and its cognate noun stand in 23 verses, and the thing devoted is normally a city or its spoil, not the speaker.

Borrowed, and flagged as borrowed: The rabbinic discussion of releasing a vow that cannot be kept, which the commentaries reach for at this point, is in the Mishnah tractate Nedarim. The Mishnah is not on this disk and nothing about it was measured here. The page reports the connection as a commonplace of the literature and takes no view on whether it bears on a first-century plot.

What the narrative supplies is arithmetic and a family. More than forty men swear to eat nothing until Paul is dead; the plot is undone by the son of Paul’s sister, who is called νεανίας twice and νεανίσκος once. It is the only appearance of any member of Paul’s family anywhere in the narrative of Acts, and the text gives neither the sister nor the son a name.

A ceiling of five means nothing on its own. It means something beside the numbers the identical screen returns for the other courtroom and synagogue speeches in Acts. All three of the rows below were run in the same session, against the same 30,637 verse units, with the same normaliser.

The full distributions, printed so the shape can be compared and not just the peak.

Scope. The 65 verse units of SBLGNT Acts 22–23, run against (a) 30,637 verse units across 64 CATSS Greek files and (b) the other 7,862 verses of the Greek New Testament. Exhaustive and deterministic.

Caveat. This finds verbatim contact. It does not find allusion. A speech can be saturated in Scripture it shares no six words with, and this page’s whole result is a statement about wording, not about how biblical anyone was thinking.

Acts 23:5 is the only verse in these 65 that carries a citation formula: γέγραπται γάρ. The verse behind it is Exodus 22:27 in the Septuagint numbering, Exodus 22:28 in the English.

Two differences: a singular where the Greek Exodus has a plural, and κακῶς after the verb where the Greek Exodus has it before. Here is what each one costs.

And here is why the tie band matters more than the run. As it stands, the four words τοῦ λαοῦ σου οὐ reach four with four verses of the Greek Old Testament, and only one of the four is the verse being quoted:

⚠️ What this does and does not show. It shows that a marked, explicit, undisputed citation can measure four with a band of four — which is to say, it can be invisible to this instrument. That is a fact about the instrument, and this page prints it against its own interest. It does not show that Acts is quoting from memory, or misquoting, or using a different Greek Exodus, or translating the Hebrew afresh. All four of those are arguments about a source, and the screen cannot reach any of them. Note also that no manuscript was consulted: the counterfactual rows above are arithmetic on the printed SBLGNT and the printed Rahlfs, not a claim about what anyone wrote.

Every one of the four verses that reaches five against the Greek New Testament matches another verse of Acts. Nothing in these 65 verses reaches five with any book outside Acts; outside Acts the ceiling is four.

The first row is the one this page keeps. Acts 22:1 and Acts 7:2 share five consecutive words and no other verse in the Greek New Testament reaches five with either. Paul’s defence opens with the words Stephen’s opened with, and nineteen verses later Paul names Stephen — the seventh and last occurrence of Στέφανος in the New Testament, all seven of them in Acts.

⚠️ And the counter-example, printed so the row above is not read as more than it is. ἄνδρες ἀδελφοί is the ordinary way a speaker addresses a Jewish assembly in Acts; it occurs many times in the book. What is measured here is that the five-word form with καὶ πατέρες ἀκούσατε occurs in exactly two verses of the New Testament. Whether that is deliberate echo, a shared convention, or the same author writing two speeches, the screen cannot say and neither will this page. The last two rows of the table are worth as little as they look: ὁ θεὸς τῶν πατέρων ἡμῶν reaches five with fourteen different verses of the Greek Old Testament, and a run matched fourteen times is a formula.

1. Acts 23:9 and Pilate. The scribes of the Pharisees say οὐδὲν κακὸν εὑρίσκομεν ἐν τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ τούτῳ. The four words ἐν τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ τούτῳ stand at Luke 23:4 and Luke 23:14, tie band 2, where Pilate says he finds no guilt in Jesus. A run of four is near the noise floor of this corpus. What lifts it slightly is that only two verses tie it, and that both of them attach the phrase to the same verdict. That is all the page claims for it.

2. Acts 23:28 and Luke 22:66. The tribune writes that he brought Paul down εἰς τὸ συνέδριον αὐτῶν; Luke 22:66 leads Jesus away εἰς τὸ συνέδριον αὐτῶν. Run 4, tie band 1. Four words, one of which is a definite article.

3. Acts 23:31 and John 19:24. Both open οἱ μὲν οὖν στρατιῶται, the soldiers therefore. Run 4, tie band 1, and it is a sentence-opening formula in narrative Greek. This one is printed precisely because it is worthless — it is what a run of four with a band of one looks like when it means nothing at all, and it sits in the same table as runs of four that a reader might want to mean something.

Zero on this page means “shares no word at all”. Every Greek-side screen here uses the unigram fallback: a row that shares no two-word sequence still scores 1 if any single word matches. So a reported run of 1 means one word shared and no pair, not that nothing is shared. The run of 1 between Acts 23:3 and Matthew 23:27 — the two whitewash verses — is exactly that: one shared word, and it is καί.

The row at 22:21 is the clearest statement of what the floor is: καὶ εἶπεν πρός με reaches four with fifty-six verses of the Greek Old Testament. That is what a four is worth in this corpus unless the band says otherwise.

Every number on this page is an agreement between two printed texts. The New Testament figures come from the SBL Greek New Testament as digitised by MorphGNT; the Greek Old Testament figures from Rahlfs’ Septuaginta as digitised by CATSS. Neither has a critical apparatus on this disk, and no manuscript was examined.

That bears on this passage particularly hard, because the Western text of Acts is at its most expansive in exactly these chapters. Codex Bezae and its allies carry additional material around the arrest, the hearing and the plot. None of it was consulted. A different edition on either side could lengthen or shorten any run on this page — including, in principle, the run at 23:5, which is the page’s central claim. If a witness were found reading ἄρχοντας … οὐ κακῶς ἐρεῖς at Acts 23:5, the run would be 7 with a band of 1 and the headline finding would be considerably duller. This page cannot rule that out; it can only say what the SBLGNT prints.

The measurement is that these 65 verses do not reach six with anything. The temptation is to conclude that Paul’s defence is unbiblical, or unscriptural, or argued on other grounds. The page refuses all three.

Consider what is in the speech without being quoted. A vision in the temple. A voice from heaven. The δίκαιος, the Righteous One — a title used of Jesus three times in Acts (3:14, 7:52, 22:14) and never explained. A blinding, a laying on of hands, a washing away of sins, a commissioning to the nations. Every one of those is drenched in the Old Testament and none of them is a quotation. The instrument sees none of it, and a page that treated its silence as an absence would be lying by arithmetic.

What can honestly be said is narrower. In Acts 7 and Acts 13 the speeches make their argument by reciting long stretches of the Greek Old Testament verbatim, and the screen finds them at 15 and 12 words. In Acts 22–23 the argument is made by narrating an experience and claiming a status — Pharisee, citizen, brother. The screen finds nothing because there is nothing of that kind to find. That is a difference in method of argument, which is a literary observation the numbers are consistent with, not something the numbers prove.

Whether Paul genuinely did not recognise the high priest at 23:5, or was speaking ironically, or could not see him; whether ‘I am a Pharisee’ at 23:6 is a confession or a manoeuvre; whether a Roman tribune would really have convened the Sanhedrin; whether Claudius Lysias’ letter is a document Luke had, a reconstruction, or a composition; whether 23:27 contradicts 22:29 or merely flatters. Word-run screening cannot decide any of these and this page does not pretend otherwise. It reports that the letter and the narrative disagree about when the tribune learned Paul was a Roman, and stops.

The place this page is thinnest. Its headline is a negative — nothing reaches six — and a negative is only as good as the corpus it was run against. If the CATSS collection held here is missing a book, or a verse, or holds a different recension of one, a six could be hiding in the gap. The collection is 64 files and 30,637 verse units, and it does hold two Greek Daniels; it does not hold Aquila, Symmachus, or any hexaplaric material. The negative is a statement about this corpus and is stated as one.

One more limit, on the control. Acts 7 and Acts 13 were screened here for this page and the figures above are ours. They have not been through the shelf’s regression lock, because no published page carries them yet. The Acts 15 figure of fourteen is published, on the Acts 14–16 page — but the lock carries no Acts figure at all, so it does not pin that one either. A reader who wants to check the control should re-run it rather than take it.

No Greek critical apparatus. No papyri — P²⁹, P⁴¹, P⁴⁸ and P⁷⁴ all touch this stretch of Acts and none was consulted. No Codex Bezae. No Latin, Syriac or Coptic versions. No patristic citations. No Josephus — and Josephus is the source for nearly everything said in the reference works about Ananias son of Nedebaeus, about Felix, and about the Antonia. No Mishnah. No Roman legal sources. No inscriptions. No commentary on Acts was read for any figure on this page.

And one claim that is easy to overstate, and is deliberately not made. It is tempting to write that the man who watched Stephen die opens his own trial with Stephen’s sentence on purpose. The page will not, because the measurement is five shared words and a band of one, and five words is five words. What is reported is that the run exists, that it is unique in the New Testament, and that Stephen is named nineteen verses later. The reader may make of that what the reader likes.

• C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (ICC, 2 vols., 1994–1998) — vol. 2 covers these chapters.
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles (Anchor Bible 31, 1998).
• Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, vol. 3 (2014) — the standard collection of the Roman legal and military background this page had to borrow.
• A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (1963) — the classic treatment of the citizenship scene and the custody arrangements.
• Brian Rapske, The Book of Acts and Paul in Roman Custody (1994).
• Marion L. Soards, The Speeches in Acts (1994) — on how the speeches relate to each other, which is the literary question behind this page’s control table.
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

Two chapters. A man stands on a stair above a crowd that has just tried to kill him, asks for silence, and gets it — because he asks in Hebrew. He tells them where he was born, who taught him, what he did to people like the ones he is now one of, and what happened to him at noon on a road. Twenty-one verses later he says the word Gentiles and the silence ends.

Then a hearing, an order to strike him on the mouth, an insult, an apology of sorts, and a sentence about the resurrection that empties the room into two halves. Then a night. Then forty men with an oath, a boy nobody names, and four hundred and seventy soldiers leaving at the third hour of the night to move one prisoner.

And underneath it, a silence that can be measured. Stephen argued from Scripture and the screen finds fifteen consecutive words of it. Paul in a synagogue argued from Scripture and the screen finds twelve. Paul on trial for his life argued from what had happened to him, and the screen finds five — twice, and both times a stock phrase. The one time he says it is written, he says it about not insulting a judge, and the words he uses are close enough to be recognised and different enough that a machine cannot find them.

The quietest verse in the passage is the one nobody heard. Acts 23:11 makes almost no verbatim contact with anything on this disk — three words against the Greek Old Testament, three against the Greek New Testament — and it is the only place in these 65 verses where somebody speaks to Paul who is not trying to kill him, arrest him, or file a report about him. Everything measurable in this study happens in daylight and in public. The one thing that changes the direction of the book happens at night, to an audience of one.