Detection and Typology of Psalmic Text Reuses in the New Testament

In the context of the BiblIndex project, which is an online index of biblical textual reuses by the Church Fathers, intrabiblical intertextuality must be considered to better understand the underlying basis of the Church Fathers’ thought. This paper examines the reuse of Psalmic texts in the New Testament as a test case for experimenting with a detection tool that uses traditional natural language processing (NLP) methods exclusively. Biblical verses are compared using similarity measures based on various NLP operations, such as tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, stop word filtering and synset assignment. Textometric measures provide a framework for the numerical assessment of grammatical, lexical and semantic similarities between textual units. We demonstrate the efficiency of this reproducible method, which does not involve a ‘black box’ effect, for detecting and characterizing literal quotations and a significant range of echoes.