Thursday, January 10, 2008

"Believing" and "Having Faith" - Searching in Logos and BibleWorks - Part 2

In the previous post, I looked at some ways of using BibleWorks7 and Logos to study the use of pisteuo/πιστευω and pistis/πιστις in the NT. As I was thinking about it this morning, I remembered another great tool in Logos that is perhaps even more helpful: the Bible Word Study. (If this dialog isn't visible on your Logos opening screen, you can also get it to via the menu: Tools > Bible Study > Bible Word Study.) Simply toggle to the Greek keyboard and type in pistis/πιστις. (NB: you need to type in the final sigma using the "v" key.)
The search doesn't take very long to run and, depending on the options you set, it returns a ton of useful data. For the issue raised in the previous post on translating this word, of greatest interest are the "Grammatical Relationships." Here are the partial results of Logos' Word Study on pistis/πιστις. With this data it is easy to check out the instances when the word functions as the subject and the Predicators that go with it. It also shows all the instances when pistis/πιστις is the complement and the verbs used with it. This is perhaps an even better way to find all those instances where echo/εχω occurs with pistis/πιστις as the complement. (Note that this way of searching does pick up two additional passages--2 Cor 4.13 and 1 Tim 3.9--where pistis/πιστις is part of the complement following echo/εχω, but it is not the direct object in the accusative case.)In addition, this Bible Word Study tool also provides a quick way of seeing all the ways that pistis/πιστις is translated in the NRSV using the Reverse Interlinear. (The relatively larger size of "faith" indicates that it is by far the most common rendering.)

This Bible Word Study tool is really useful for getting an overview of a word's usage and its grammatical relationships to other words.

BTW: Logos also provides a Reverse Interlinear for the ESV which includes both the OT and the NT. To see how the ESV translates
pistis/πιστις, you can use the Bible Speed Search, choose the ESV NT Reverse Interlinear, type in the word and go. Once the results appear, click on "Concordance" in the upper right of the box, and it will produce a list of all the ways the word is translated with their frequencies.

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