Breakdown of the Favorite Gospel of 70 Respondents

I did a voluntary survey via Instagram Stories, which was available to a select group of my followers for 24 hours. I decided it would be best to limit my semi-random survey to my Christian circle of social connections. I added everyone that followed me that I beleived to be a Christian to a “close friends” list, which allows only the people on said list to view the survey I posted. I then presented 3 questions: What is your favorite Gospel, why is it your favorite Gospel, and what is your favorite moment/passage/event in Jesus’ earthly ministry (besides his death/resurrection). A raw summary of the data I gathered from these polls follows:

##  Gender      Book   
##  F:50   John   :38  
##  M:20   Luke   : 9  
##         Mark   : 8  
##         Matthew:15

The respondents were mostly female, and the favorite Gospel overall (regardles of gender) was John.

Out of roughly 200 people that saw the survey, only 70 responded.

My poll was female dominant with a 5:2 ratio of women to men responding. This is likely due to a variety of factors. I suspect I follow a disproportionate amount of Christian women, as most Christian clubs/groups/Bible studies I have participated in have had more women than men (for reasons unknown). However, this assertion is not without data to back it. A study from Pew Research Center in 2016 shows that 60% of American women consider religion to be important versus only 47% of American men [source]. Additionally, a study done at San Jose State University in 2008 shows that women are more likely to respond to online surveys than men [source]. Both of these factors likely interact leading to a large gap in gendered responses. Even so, this should not noticably skew the data, as favored Gospel should not be affected by gender (further analysis may disprove this claim, but with the data we have now it’s what we’re rolling with). Backing my assumption is the fact that in this survey similar proportions of males and females favored each respective Gospel. While the sample size is relatively small, it still gives credence to my assumption.

The following interactive graph (called a Sankey Diagram) is a breakdown of the first three responses and their relations to other responses.

This graph is a cool way to visualize the data and how it all connects, but unfortunately it doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know.

The only remaining data to analyze is people’s favorite parts of Jesus’ earthly ministry. 20 people (28% of respondents) answered this query (5 more than answered the “why” question). These answers are hard to display visually, as many people gave multiple incidents, some gave rather ambigius answers, and as a whole it is entirely qualitative (non-numerical) data.

Sorting through all 20 reponses yielded 24 total answers, since multiple people chose more than one passage. These values also change some when you factor in uniquness of the passage, which we will examine later. This chart shows how many of people’s favorite passages are in what Gospels:

Matthew (11) - 33.3%

Mark (5) - 15.2%

Luke (7) - 21.2%

John (12) - 36.4%

You may know that every Gospel is not entirely unique, which is an interesting factor to examine here. The frequency or uniqueness of a particular incident could make it stand out more than another. This is not saying the Gospels repeat each other word for word, rather the the story they present may also be told in another Gospel. For example, the birth of Jesus is recounted in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (John excludes it in his narrative). Each telling of Jesus’s birth is slightly different and has a few details that differ but we would consider this to be a repeated narrative and not a unique one. A unique passage would for example be the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) which only appears in the book of Matthew.

Mark is by far the least unique book, and according to Britannica “more than 90 percent of the content of Mark’s Gospel appears in Matthew’s and more than 50 percent in the Gospel of Luke” [source]. In fact, as little as 3% of Mark’s gospel is reportedly unique to Mark, while Luke and Matthew have 35% and 24% of their content unique to them respectively [source]. John is special in that over 90% of his Gospel is unique [source].

The following pie chart takes the same incidents from before and looks at how many times they are repeated throughout the Gospels:

Not Repeated/unique (17) - 68%

Repeated Twice (1) - 4%

Repeated Thrice (6) - 24%

Repeated 4x (1) - 4%

Only one passage appeared twice, and only one four times, while 17 passages were unique. Most of the unique passages were from John, going along with the trend we’ve seen in the responses so far favoring John. As previously stated, John is over 90% unique material. The only passage named that was repeated in all four Gospels was the woman (Mary) annointing Jesus (Matthew 26:6-13; Mark 14:3-9; Luke 7:36-50; John 12:1-8). The only passage mentioned that was repeated twice was the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30, Luke 19:11-27).

The following Sankey Diagram helps visualize these passages’ relationships between all four Gospels. Mousing over individual boxes/lines/connections make the relationships even more apparent.

Here’s a more definitive plot of which passages were mentioned by more than one respondent:

All other passages were only mentioned once, with a total of 21 different narratives. The most popular was obviously Lazarus’ Resurrection (John 11).

Thank you for making it all the way through! I hope you’ve found this as interesting as I did. If you have any questions or spot any errors or have any ideas on what to do with this data you can email me at lngreenhouse@ucdavis.edu

Raw data can be viewed here

Made in RStudio