Spatial Markers in the Synoptic Gospels. An Annotated Dataset

This repository contains scripts and data files to examine the distribution of spatial markers in the Gospel texts of the SBLGNT edition (https://www.sblgnt.com/about/introduction/).

The spatial vocabulary is built from almost 1000 spatial markers, among them those of Louw/Nida’s domains D1, D7, D15-D17, D45, D80-D85, D93 (Louw, Johannes P., and Eugene A. Nida (eds.). 1989: Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains (2nd ed.; New York, NY: United Bible Societies)).

Data provided is:

Python notebooks for cleaning the SBLGNT-text and the list of spatial markers, for extracting the spatial markers from the texts of the Gospels and creating tsv-files for each Gospel’s spatial vocabulary.

The annotated data: tsv-files of the spatial vocabulary of each gospel book and a table of the spatial vocabulary. (Delimiter in tsv files is tabstop.)

A Quarto notebook with the R script for analyzing and visualizing the extracted data.

Png-files of the created plots.

Data analysis was used for the publication:

Timo Glaser: The House, the Table, and the Message. Spatial Dynamics in the Synoptic Gospels, JSNT 2026