# The Gospels' 3,986 Words Cover 89.6%

> The four Gospels use 3,986 distinct Chinese words between them, and those words account for 89.6% of every word token in the Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified) and 95.7% of the New Testament.

Question: do the Gospels cover the Bible's vocabulary
Answer: 89.6% of the Bible
Page: https://chinese-bible.com/en/reference/do-the-gospels-cover-the-bible

Reading plans start with the Gospels for reasons that have nothing to do with vocabulary, but the vocabulary happens to agree. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John together use 3,986 distinct words — 35.7% of the Bible's full vocabulary — and because those words are the common ones, they carry 89.6% of all its word tokens.

Inside the New Testament the figure is 95.7%, counted directly over New Testament text rather than inferred. What is left is mostly the epistles' theological vocabulary and the names in Acts and Revelation, which a reader picks up book by book.

The two testaments overlap more than their sizes suggest: 5,153 words appear in both, so 80.2% of the New Testament's vocabulary is already present in the Old. Starting in the Gospels therefore costs nothing later — it front-loads exactly the words the rest of the Bible reuses.

## What the Gospels give you

| Measure | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Distinct words in the four Gospels | 3,986 |
| Share of the Bible's vocabulary | 35.7% |
| Share of the Bible's word tokens they cover | 89.6% |
| Share of New Testament tokens they cover | 95.7% |
| New Testament vocabulary also in the Old | 80.2% |
| Words shared by both testaments | 5,153 |


## Questions

**Which Gospel should I read first?**

John, by vocabulary: 72.3% of its word tokens are HSK 1-3, and it is 1st of all 66 books by that measure.

**How much of the Old Testament do they cover?**

Less, and the table says why: the Old Testament runs to 9,897 distinct words against the New Testament's 6,424.

**Is there a deck for exactly these words?**

Each Gospel has its own deck, ordered by how often each word occurs in that Gospel.

## Method

- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation)
- HSK levels: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9
- Reading times: 260 characters a minute (an assumption)
- Computed: 2026-09-22

These are reproducible counts over a public-domain text, not a peer-reviewed study. Difficulty ranks are one stated formula, not a validated readability score.


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- Definitions: CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
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- Character data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License / LGPL).
- Bible text: public domain — 和合本 · World English Bible · Louis Segond 1910.
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