New Testament by the Numbers: 27 Books, 69 Moments and 5,825 Manuscripts

Come, Follow Me 2027 reads the whole New Testament in one year. Before you start, it helps to see what you're reading. New Testament by the Numbers measures the book: four witnesses to one life, one physician's history of the Church, and letters carried by hand across the Roman world.

The shape of the book

The four Gospels and Acts are well over half of the New Testament. Paul's thirteen letters together are about the length of Luke and John.

A year of reading, week by week

The 2027 course covers the whole New Testament in 50 reading weeks, plus Easter and Christmas. Some weeks are a single chapter. Others ask for more than 300 verses. At 200 words a minute, the whole King James New Testament is about 15 hours, and the page will build you a reading plan from your own pace and start date.

Four witnesses, one life

The page lines up the same 69 moments used in The Road and the Gallery Walk and shows which Gospels tell each one. One fact stands out: about 1 in 3 verses of the Gospels, 1,260 of 3,779, tell the last week of the Savior's life, from the triumphal entry to the last Resurrection appearance.

Words and Greek

The New Testament was written in Koine, the everyday Greek of the Roman world. Its 137,554 words come from just 5,461 dictionary words, and 1,966 of them appear exactly once. In “Lovest thou me?” (John 21:15–17), English uses one word for love, but the Greek uses two. Twice Jesus asks with agapaō and Peter answers with phileō. The third time, Jesus asks with Peter's word.

How the text survived

No original letter or Gospel survives. What we have are copies, made by hand for 1,400 years. The official list of Greek New Testament manuscripts runs to 5,825 numbers: 136 papyri, 290 majuscules, 2,901 minuscules and 2,498 lectionaries.

Around the world

In 1880, 185 languages had at least a New Testament. By September 2026 it was 2,651, including 807 with the full Bible. The page shows John 3:16 in 904 languages from 23 writing systems.

Latter-day Saint connections

The page counts the 213 Joseph Smith Translation cards attached to verses in New Testament, Connected, and Matthew alone has more than a fifth of them. It also sets the Sermon on the Mount beside the sermon the risen Christ gave at the temple in Bountiful. Of 50,685 scripture links in General Conference talks since April 2000, 14,432 point to the New Testament, second only to the Book of Mormon. One favorite, Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me, all ye that labour,” appears in 112 talks.

Questions

Which text do the counts use?

Verse and word counts come from the King James text used in New Testament, Connected. Greek counts come from MorphGNT, the word-by-word tagging of the SBL Greek New Testament.

Is this an official Church resource?

No. By the Numbers is an independent Weak Things project. The figures come from official Church reports and other published sources, listed on the page.

Keep exploring

• Come, Follow Me 2027: every week of the year in one place
• New Testament, Connected: every verse, with the Greek and the talks that cite it
• Dead Sea Scrolls by the Numbers: the Bible the New Testament quotes

See all the projects on the By the Numbers page.

See the shape of the book →