Righteousness in Early Christian Literature: Distant Reading and Textual Networks

The article joins the scholarly discussion about the meaning of righteousness language in biblical literature with consideration of changes in the concept from archaic Greek literature to fourth century Christian texts. The article seeks to showcase and evaluate how methods from the area of computational linguistics and distributional semantics can contribute to the discussion. The article suggests that, together with formal network models, namely word co-occurrence networks and similarity networks, the methods reveal changes in large corpora of textual data which are too subtle to be detected by close reading. On the other hand, some questions require or benefit greatly from combining distant and close reading methods