Eighteen Words, Entire

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Mark, Gospel of,” “Divorce,” “Ransom,” “Temple, Jerusalem,” “Jericho,” “Hosanna.”
• Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (IVP) — “Triumphal Entry,” “Temple Cleansing,” “Ransom Saying,” “Rich and Poor,” “Discipleship.”
• New International Dictionary of NT Theology & Exegesis — λύτρον, ἀποστερέω, ὁδός, ἐξουσία, σκεῦος, ὡσαννά.
• Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson (Baker, 2007) — the Mark chapter, where the Genesis 1:27 / 2:24 argument, the Decalogue list at 10:19, Psalm 118 at 11:9 and the Isaiah 56 / Jeremiah 7 pair at 11:17 are all treated at length.
• None of these were 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 where the answer is that there is none. On a New Testament book there is no second scripture column to be offset from — and on this passage the numbering still bites twice.

The SBLGNT row was counted off disk; the ESV row is the printed edition’s shape, because no ESV Mark file is held here to count. Both run 1–25 and then 27–33. The King James tradition prints a verse 26 — but if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses — which is close to, but not the same sentence as, Matthew 6:15, where the SBLGNT reads ἐὰν δὲ μὴ ἀφῆτε τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, οὐδὲ ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ἀφήσει τὰ παραπτώματα ὑμῶν — without which is in heaven, and with an object Mark’s verse 26 does not carry. This page reports which printed edition it is counting and does not call either reading early or late. No critical apparatus was consulted.

And the second numbering fact is a genuine Septuagint offset, reached sideways. Mark 11:9 shares six consecutive words with the Greek Psalter. Those words sit at Septuagint Psalm 117:26 and at Psalm 118:26 in the Masoretic text and in every English Bible, because the Greek Psalter runs one chapter behind the Hebrew from Psalm 9/10 through Psalm 147. Written without its column label, ‘Psalm 117:26’ names the wrong psalm to an English reader and ‘Psalm 118:26’ names the wrong psalm to the file this page measured. Both are printed, every time.

Mark 10:32 says ἀναβαίνοντες εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα, going up to Jerusalem, and 10:33 repeats it. The pilgrim idiom is standard and this page does not need a reference work to see what Mark does with it.

Counted off disk: ὁδός occurs sixteen times in Mark, and four of the sixteen are in this chapter. The first is at 1:2–3, where a messenger prepares one. The one man in chapter 10 who ends up on the road is the one who began beside it.

⚠️ What was not checked. That going up is pilgrimage language, that the Jericho road climbs roughly a kilometre in twenty-seven, and that Passover crowds swelled the city, are all reported from the reference works. No Josephus, no Mishnah, no itinerary and no archaeological report is held on this disk. What was measured is the word count.

All four Gospels have the colt. πῶλος occurs twelve times in the Greek New Testament and every one of the twelve is in an entry narrative.

Mark’s entry narrative carries no measurable contact with Zechariah 9:9 at all. It may still be shaped by it — a great deal of scholarship says so, and a contiguous-run screen would not see that shaping. The page reports the 1 and refuses to convert it into an argument in either direction. One place where the geography does touch the Greek Old Testament: the phrase τὸ ὄρος τῶν ἐλαιῶν, the Mount of Olives, stands in that exact form six times in the Greek New Testament (Matthew 21:1; 26:30; Mark 11:1; 13:3; 14:26; Luke 22:39), twice more in the genitive ὄρους τῶν ἐλαιῶν (Matthew 24:3; Luke 19:37), and in exactly one verse of the whole Greek Old Testament held here — Zechariah 14:4, which uses it twice.

Two details in Mark 11 that no other Gospel reports, and that this page can count but cannot explain.

11:16: καὶ οὐκ ἤφιεν ἵνα τις διενέγκῃ σκεῦος διὰ τοῦ ἱεροῦ — and he would not allow anyone to carry a vessel through the temple. σκεῦος stands 23 times in the Greek New Testament and means anything from a household jar to a ship’s gear. The verse’s deepest contact with the 7,254 non-Markan verses of the Greek New Testament is two words, tie band 236. Whether the sentence describes a halt to a shortcut across the courts, a halt to the trade, or something else, is exactly the kind of question this disk cannot answer: the Mishnah tractate Berakhot 9:5, which is always cited here, is not held.

11:13: ὁ γὰρ καιρὸς οὐκ ἦν σύκων — for it was not the season for figs. Mark writes the difficulty into his own sentence; Matthew 21:19, telling the same story, does not have the clause. The two verses share a run of 3. The withering measures even less: Mark 11:20 against Matthew 21:19 is a run of 1. Two Gospels report the same tree and share almost no words about it.

⚠️ What was not checked. Fig phenology, Passover dating, the layout of the Herodian courts, and the whole rabbinic discussion of carrying through the temple mount. None of it is on this disk and none of it was measured.

Every verse of Mark 10–11 against every verse of the Greek New Testament outside Mark. Exhaustive; nothing sampled.

Thirty-eight of the 84 rows reach six or more; twenty-two reach three or less. The passage is not uniformly ‘parallel’ to anything: it is loud in places and silent in others, and the silences are as informative as the runs.

Indexing every 18-word sequence in all 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament and asking which sequences appear in two different books gives exactly ten verse-pairs.

Lower the threshold to seventeen and four more pairs join, one of which is Mark 10:45 · Matthew 20:28. Lower it to sixteen and there are eighteen pairs; to fifteen, twenty-three. Three of the ten at eighteen are whole verses identical end to end, and Mark 10:15 / Luke 18:17 is the shortest and least famous of the three. Nothing in this table says which book wrote a sentence first, and this page does not say it either.

Two rows in that table are printed against the page’s own argument. Mark 11:27 shares five consecutive words with a list of temple officials in 2 Chronicles 19:11, and it means nothing — the five are καὶ οἱ γραμματεῖς καὶ οἱ, the middle of Mark’s chief priests and scribes and elders, which is what such a list looks like in Greek. Mark 11:23 shares four with Jonah, Exodus and Isaiah at a tie band of sixteen, which is what a formula looks like. And the row everyone wants to connect to Isaiah 53 measures one.

① The commandment list: same four, same order, same scene, zero shared words.

Mark and Matthew agree about the order and share nothing; Mark and Luke disagree about the order and share seven. A screen that measured only agreement of sequence and a screen that measured only agreement of wording would give opposite answers about which two Gospels are close here. This page runs the second kind and says so out loud. And the same seven words that Mark shares with Luke he also shares with Ephesians, which is not telling this story at all — the run is a Decalogue formula, not a Synoptic relationship.

② The prayer saying finds the wrong partner. Mark 11:25 — and whenever you stand praying, forgive — is normally read beside Matthew 6:14–15, the coda to the Lord’s Prayer. Measured, it reaches 4 against Matthew 6:14 and 3 against 6:15. Its deepest partner in the whole New Testament outside Mark is Matthew 7:11 at a run of 7, a verse about fathers who give good gifts — because both contain the phrase ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς. The engine found a formula and called it a maximum. That is what the tie band and this paragraph are for.

③ The distribution of partners is partly an artefact. Counting the books that appear among the deepest partners of the 84 rows: Matthew 54, Luke 48, then Acts 18 and John 14. Of the rows that have a single deepest partner, 24 are in Matthew and 18 in Luke. That looks like a finding and is mostly a consequence of Matthew and Luke covering the same narrative: a row whose best run is a common four-word phrase is still assigned to whichever verse holds it. The figure is worth reporting; it is not worth building an argument on.

Every number on this page is a count of contiguous runs of whole word forms after one normalisation: lowercased, accents and breathings dropped, final sigma folded, filtered to Greek letters, with the editions’ own spelling equivalences applied (οὐ/οὐκ/οὐχ, ἐκ/ἐξ, the movable nu). Never lemmas. Two verses that say the same thing in different inflections measure low; two verses that share a stock phrase measure high. The screen finds verbatim contact. It does not find allusion, and it cannot tell a citation from a parallel from an accident.

The corpus is the SBL edition as digitized by MorphGNT and the CATSS files held on this disk. A different printed edition would produce a different ranking — probably not a very different one, but this page cannot prove that either, because no second edition is held.

No Greek critical apparatus, no papyri, no patristic citations, no versions (Syriac, Latin, Coptic). No rabbinic material — which matters more here than on most pages, because the standard reading of Mark 11:16 depends on Mishnah Berakhot 9:5, and this page could not verify a word of it. No Josephus, so nothing about the Herodian courts, the money trade or Passover crowds was measured. No archaeology. No Qumran material on Genesis 1:27 behind 10:6. No commentary on Mark was read for any figure on this page.

Three claims on this page are more fragile than they look.

① “Mark 11:16 touches nothing” is a statement about verbatim contact inside one corpus. It means no other verse repeats its words. It does not mean the sentence stands outside Scripture’s vocabulary, and it certainly does not mean the incident is unattested — only that no other New Testament verse says it. A page read carelessly would turn a low number into a historical claim.

② “Eighteen is the deepest” is a claim about the SBLGNT and about book boundaries. The screen deliberately ignores within-book repetition, so a sentence Mark says twice is invisible to it. And the eighteen-word figure would move if the edition printed ἐάν for ἄν at Mark 10:15 — a variant the SBLGNT marks in its apparatus and this page did not consult. The finding is stated as a fact about a file, because that is what it is.

③ The Isaiah 53 silence is the page’s biggest known blind spot. Mark 10:45 measures 1 against Septuagint Isaiah 53:11 and 1 against 53:12. A very large literature argues that the ransom saying reaches back to the Servant Song, sometimes through a Hebrew or Aramaic route the Greek would not preserve. The run engine has nothing to say about that argument in either direction, and a reader who took the 1 as a refutation would be misusing this page.

• R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark (NIGTC, 2002) — the standard technical treatment of these two chapters.
• Joel Marcus, Mark 8–16 (Anchor Yale Bible, 2009).
• Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark (Hermeneia, 2007).
• Morna D. Hooker, Jesus and the Servant (1959), and the long argument since about whether Mark 10:45 reaches back to Isaiah 53.
• Rikki E. Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark (1997) — on the road, the way, and Isaiah in this Gospel; the reading this page’s screen is least able to test.
• David Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible (2002) — the rabbinic and documentary material behind 10:2–12 that this page could not consult.
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

Mark 10:15 and Luke 18:17 are the same eighteen words in the same order, and eighteen words is the whole of each verse. Only ten verse-pairs in the entire Greek New Testament share that much across a book boundary, and only three of the ten are complete verses on both sides. The other two are Isaiah 6 quoted in two books, and a saying about Nineveh. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.

Thirty verses later comes the sentence everybody knows — the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many — and it measures one word less, because Mark opens it καὶ γάρ and Matthew opens it ὥσπερ. Two connectives are the whole difference between the most-quoted verse in Mark 10 and the most-shared one.

And at the far end of the passage, in a temple courtyard, stands a single line that no other book in the New Testament repeats in any measure worth the name: he would not let anyone carry a vessel through. Ten words, a deepest run of two, and a tie band of 236. One Gospel saw it, wrote it down, and nobody copied it.

Which is the honest summary of what this page is for. The engine found the eighteen and would never have found the fig tree wrapped around the temple; a reader found the frame and could not have found the eighteen. Both are in the text. The page prints the numbers, the tie bands, and the places where the numbers mislead, and leaves the reading to you.

The passage begins with a question about what a man may lawfully send away, and ends with a question about authority that nobody will answer. In between, a rich man goes away sorrowful and a blind beggar throws off his cloak and follows on the road.