Muuttuva vanhurskaus: Dikaios-sanojen yhteisesiintymien verkostoanalyysi varhaiskristillisyydessä

The article looks at dikaios terminology across 31 Christian texts from Paul to the end of the second century CE. The theory of the evolution of language posits that language changes mainly due to adaptations demanded by different social situations. In a similar vein, distributional semantics insists that words have no stable meanings, deriving them rather from context. Accordingly, the article applies the method of word co-occurrence, visualized in a similarity network of authors, to illustrate the variety with which early Christian authors used dikaios terminology. This network reveals an expected strong connection in dikaios language between Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Romans and a somewhat weaker connection between these and some canonical pseudepigraphical Pauline letters, Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians, and Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho. Only weak connections exist between Paul’s letters and the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Ignatius, and Irenaeus’s Adversus haereses.