Spoke 12
II Kings, Nahum, Titus
Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able
by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers. For there are many unruly
and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: Whose mouths must be stopped,
who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake.
Titus 1.9f
Then the king of Assyria commanded, saying, Carry thither one of
the priests whom ye brought from thence; and let them go and dwell there, and let
him teach them the manner of the God of the land. Then one of the priests whom they
had carried away from Samaria came and dwelt in Bethel, and taught them how they should fear the LORD.
II Kings 17.28
The three books of I . II Timothy and Titus form a little group unto themselves
traditionally known as the Pastoral Epistles because they are written by Paul directly to Pastors
Timothy and Titus. All three
have a strong theme of Teaching because this is one of the primary duties of a Pastor. The graph below shows
the raw distribution of the words teach* or taught throughout the KJV:
There is a fairly
strong correlation between Cycles 1 and 2 which have a cc of .39. The contributions from the
synoptic Gospels are almost identical, being 15, 17, and 17 hits, respectively. They combine with
significant contributions from the Wisdom literure to reveal this part of the Wheel to be rich with
the theme of teaching. This is what one would expect from both the Wisdom literature and the New
Testament History with its emphasis on the Teaching of Jesus.
The vast difference in the size of the books of the Bible - e.g. the 2461 verses of the Psalms verses
the 46 verses of Titus, a fiftyfold difference - makes the raw distribution graphs insensatitve to
fine structure involving the smaller books. To detect the finer details, we need to weight the data
according to the size of the books. For example, we can divide the number of hits by the number of
verses in the book to give the density of the distribution, as in the graph
below:
Now the specific emphasis upon "teaching" in the Pastoral Epistles can be clearly seem.
A linear representation
of this data separates the Spokes so the particular emphassis - unique to the Pastoral letters and
maximized in Titus is easily seen:
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