Fact Check: Whitaker claims tax code is five times longer than the Bible

Introduction

'The tax code now has approximately five times the number of words in the Bible and none of the good news.'

Source of claim

Matt Whitaker, a former federal prosecutor from Ankeny seeking the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate

Analysis

Whitaker's comment during Iowa Public Television's April 24 Republican debate was designed to get laughs — which it did — and make a point about the unwieldiness of the U.S. tax code.

We can't verify the 'good news' part of Whitaker's claim, but we can check the numbers.

The IRS's National Taxpayer Advocate's 2013 annual report to Congress says the U.S. tax code has nearly 4 million words.

'In 2012, the National Taxpayer Advocate has designated the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code as one of the most serious problems facing taxpayers,' the report states. 'The existing code, by our count, has reached nearly 4 million words and imposes unconscionable burden on taxpayers.'

The word count of the Bible depends on the version, said Hector Avalos, an Iowa State University religious studies professor.

'Catholics and Protestants differ on the number of books that they count as 'canonical,'' Avalos said. 'Catholic Bibles usually have more books, and so Catholic Bibles will have many more words than in Protestant Bibles.'

Avalos pointed us to the blog of Daniel Wallace, a professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. Wallace writes the number of words in the Bible's New Testament range from 173,293 in the Revised Standard Version to 192,784 in the Good News Translation, or Today's English Version.

Longer Bibles use more paraphrasing compared to the more literal translations with fewer words, Wallace writes.

Whitaker's spokesman, Jason Klindt, said the candidate prefers to read the New International Version (NIV) Bible. The word count of the whole NIV — Old and New testaments — is 727,969 words, according to Robert Cargill, assistant professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa.

Conclusion

With the U.S. tax code nearing 4 million words and the Bible having fewer than 800,000, the tax code does exceed the holy book by about five times.

Whitaker's statement is true.

In case you're interested, the tax code is about seven times longer than Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and 19 times longer than Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick,' according to a 2012 Huffington Post article that uses Amazon's Text Stats.

Sources

IRS Taxpayer Advocate Report, including word count (p97): http://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/userfiles/file/2013FullReport/Volume-1.pdf

New Testament word count: http://danielbwallace.com/2012/10/08/fifteen-myths-about-bible-translation/

Book word counts (with Amazon Text Stats numbers): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/book-length_n_1334636.html