I have worked through the Old and New Testament, trying to identify every speech in the Bible by reference, speaker, audience, and brief description. By my criteria, I found 235 speeches in the Old Testament and 278 in the New Testament, for a total of 513 speeches. This will be a useful tool as I work on writing a Rhetoric text. Some interesting notes:
- The gospel of Luke had the most speeches of any book (81)
- Moses delivers the longest single speech (Deuteronomy 5:1 through 26:19)
- The longest New Testament speech is, of course, the Sermon on the Mount.
- Jesus delivers the most speeches (214), followed by Moses (24), then David (13)
- Job, Peter and Paul all deliver the same number of speeches (11)
I am now working on the best way to make it available for others to use.