How to read it. The x axis is a verse’s position inside its own volume, so a
line stops where its own text ends: the Pearl of Great Price runs out after 635 verses, the
Old Testament keeps going to 23,145. Height is the number of mentioning verses accumulated so far,
and slope is the local rate — a 45° climb means nearly every verse mentions him, a flat
stretch means none do. Switch the x axis to % through volume to compare shapes rather
than lengths.
The two halves of the New Testament. They are drawn in the two blues, dark for the Gospels and light for the rest, because they are one volume. Pooled, the New Testament is 52% Christ-mentioning; that figure describes neither half. The Gospels run at 71% and the books after them at 35%. The two halves name him at nearly the same rate — 25% against 22% — so almost the whole gap is that he speaks in the Gospels and does not in the letters.
Two definitions. Broad counts a verse if it names Jesus, uses one of his titles,
or refers to him contextually — he is the one speaking, or the antecedent of a pronoun.
Explicit only requires a name or title in the verse itself. The gap between them is the
work the contextual rules are doing, and it is largest in the Doctrine and Covenants, where
Christ speaks in first person for pages at a time.
The volumes as printed. The same sweep with the New Testament kept whole shows the five standard-works volumes in their canonical divisions.
Source. output/01_LDS_standard_works.csv, a single edition throughout, so
the Old and New Testaments are the LDS King James Version and no cross-translation drift enters.
Verses are in canonical print order, which is not composition order. Built by
scripts/45_cumulative_series.R; full-resolution counts in
output/00_CUMULATIVE_SERIES.csv.