Network Analysis of the Four Gospels and the Catechism of the Catholic Church

There are many religions, such as Christianity, that have sought to spread their messages and have subsequently created a collection of documents. However, as the literature grows, it becomes more problematic to interpret any single text and perceive how it relates to other documents. This situation is common in other areas of human activity, not just religions. In this paper, we propose a method of Synoptic Network Analysis, to represent the relationships between multiple overlapping texts as a network, and to analyze the structure and semantics of the texts by clustering the network. This method is applied to the four traditional Christian Gospels and the Catechism of the Catholic Church in order to extract the main messages common to these Gospels, to highlight the dogmatic characteristics of each Gospel and the Catechism and to compare those results. Unlike traditional literature-based approaches, Synoptic Network Analysis is a scientific method that incorporates falsifiability and replicability. The method makes it possible to scientifically evaluate various literature-based hypotheses.