Recently I noticed that Re 20.4 appears to be the verse in the Greek NT with the most words (that is the longest verse, though I’ve not verified that with a count of letters in the verse). So I figured I’d do a word count of every verse in the Greek NT to verify it. These counts are based on the NA27. “Word” is defined as a space-delimited token (with punctuation stripped), so a crasis (e.g. καγω) is counted as one word.
58 Words: Re 20:4
52 Words: Mk 16:8;* Re 3:12
50 Words: Re 5:13; Re 9:20
48 Words: Re 17:8
47 Words: Lk 6:42; Jn 8:44
46 Words: Jn 20:25
45 Words: Re 6:8
44 Words: Re 11:18; Re 12:10
43 Words: Re 14:18; Re 19:20
42 Words: Jn 18:36; Jn 18:37; Ac 21:11; 1 Jn 2:27
41 Words: Lk 10:21; Re 4:8
40 Words: Mt 2:13; Mt 18:8; Ac 28:17
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* Mk 16.8 here includes the shorter ending of Mark, accounting for the length of the verse.
Why does Revelation appear to have so many long verses? Was Stephanus getting near the end of his carriage ride and pushing to get to the end? (yes, that’s a joke).
I should note that a length of 15 words (again, according to NA27) appears to be by far the most popular count (over 500 times).