Ancient Scripts

Ancient Scripts: A compendium of world-wide writing systems from prehistory to today is a very helpful site for understanding the development of and relationships between ancient languages and their writing systems. The author, Lawrence Lo, acknowledges that he is not a linguist, but this is a passionate hobby for him. He has done a great job as far as I can tell. Note the sections on writing systems, phonetics, and historical linguistics as well as a journal, game(s), downloads, reference, and a large collection of links. [HT: Scribal Practices]

If you want some actual ancient scripts related to biblical studies to use in your documents, check:

• Jack Kilmon's Scriptorium (start here)
• RK Ancient Fonts
• Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts

Some things change... some do not (a snapshot of Greek on the web)

While I was looking for something else, I stumbled upon the archives of the B-Greek list which started out in 1992 as the NT-Greek mailing list. Check the 1992-3 thread list and the 1993-4 thread list and the list of subscribers as of 5/5/1992. You'll recognize some of the names: Robert Kraft (UPenn CCAT), John Baima (Silver Mountain BibleWindows>Bibloi; claims to be the only Bible software author lurking on the Internet), Benjamin Wright (NETS project), Larry Hurtado, and others.

Want to know pretty much all the "Software for Theologians" that was available and known in 1994? It's all on three relatively short pages HERE and HERE and HERE.

What were some of the hot topics in 1992-3? Let me try to disambiguate the rather jumbled list:

• Bible software (hmmm... BibleWindows, Logos, acCordance for mac [with the lament that there aren't more mac users; and make sure you have Hypercard 2.1], or some combination of Gramcord, ChiWriter, and NotaBene... oh, do you want that in DOS or Windows?)
• Lots of stuff on available versions and lexicons and such (What happened to D.A. Carson's Syntactical Concordance of the Greek NT?)
  
• Reports on discovery of ancient papyrii having "potentially major significance" (the Petra papyrii from the Byzantine church)
• Translation discussions: literal or dynamic equivalency theory? (with a response by none other than James Tauber of future MorphGNT fame)
• Textual criticism issues (including quite a number of posts by Bart Ehrman back in the day)
• Biblical fonts: you want that in ScriptureFonts, TrueType, PostScript?
  
• An announcement of the TLG information server... you'll have to gopher to get it
  

As you can see, some things change... some do not. Incidentally, I found what must be one of the first instances in the biblical field of what is now a very popular term: disambiguation. (According to Merriam-Webster, however, the term dates all the way back to 1963.)

Things to consider when working with the Greek NT

I have studied Greek for long enough now that when I look at a NT text, I can usually pick up most of the 'interesting' aspects of the text or the ones that I recognize will need more investigation. My Greek students, however, are just finishing their required introduction to Greek grammar (two week intensive plus a semester). I have tried to establish a foundation of vocabulary and grammar, but I have also encouraged them to become proficient at using their Bible software to help out with parsing and vocab and such. Even with the software, however, it is not so obvious to my students what is noteworthy in the Greek text.
If one keeps in mind that these students have only had an introduction to Greek grammar for a little more than a semester, how would you go about helping them to 'see' the text and work with it productively? I have decided that the goal is NOT to "translate" the Greek. Committees of scholars who know way more about the Greek than I do have already given us plenty of translations. I have also decided that one of the best ways for my students to see the text is to work with the Greek in conjunction with a range of English versions. If there is something 'interesting' going on in the text, it usually shows up as one looks at a 'literal' translation as compared to a 'functionally equivalent' one or at a translation based on the NA27 as compared to one based on the Textus Receptus. (The little graphic clip above shows the kind of layout I encourage them to use.) Do note also that I am trying to keep things as simple as possible. As I have talked to pastors after some years in ministry, most of them have left their Greek behind because they had forgotten so much vocab and grammar. Bible software can address that problem, but they have also let their Greek go, because it took too much time to 'translate' the text. I want to establish some patterns of study that allow a person to get at the significant issues in a text quickly.
I am trying, therefore, to lay out some guidelines of things to consider when working with the Greek NT that reflect the kind of questions I am intuitively thinking about. Take a look at the PDF of a working guide I've attached, and let me know if you have other suggestions. Thanks!
BTW, if you see a little paper icon in front of that link, you should be able to hover over it and have the PDF pop up without clicking. Once the popup appears, you can enlarge the window.

Hebrew Search Comes to Olive Tree iPhone Bible Reader Beta

Not long ago, I noted that Olive Tree had Greek searching capability for its iPhone Bible Reader, and now This Lamp reports that Hebrew searching is also available. Check the screen shot there.

Print your own public domain book

In an earlier post I noted the large list of books in the public domain related to biblical studies that have been digitized and posted for viewing or download on such sites as Google Books or Internet Archive. Bob Buller (SBL) alerted me to the fact that you can, and in fact are encouraged, to print any of these books via Lulu or other POD (print on demand) providers. I had some issues getting things to work on Lulu (they seem to prefer PDF text rather than PDF images), but PublicDomainReprints.org is especially designed to work with Google Books and Internet Archive. You can search directly from their front page or enter in the URL of a book you have found. I found that a paperback version of a 150 page book would be about USD $8 and books with 250+ pages would be in the USD $13-20 range (not counting any shipping/handling/tax). If you really want that hardcopy in your hand, this is not a bad way to go.
PublicDomainReprints also has a blog if you want to keep up on latest news. One interesting tidbit I saw there was that the Boston Public Library apparently is the first library to allow scan on demand. Check their list of scannable books, make your request, and it is delivered 5-7 days later in electronic form. The service is even free, but donations are suggested. (And then you can use PublicDomainReprints to get it printed, if you want.) Look for other libraries to start offering this service.

Tyndale Bulletin online & Google now searching magazines

Two journal / magazine items to note:
I just discovered that the Tyndale Bulletin has now posted online the full text of all its articles from volume 1 of 1956 up to 3 years ago. You can get article summaries from 1993 to the present. Check it out HERE. [HT: Bryan's]

Google now is searching magazines! I can't exactly find the list of all the magazines it is digitizing, but it must be an eclectic list. To just search in magazines, use the Advanced Book Search and choose that option. I was trying to think of a biblical term that might have shown up in magazines and tried "ossuary." HERE is what I came up with. Hmmm... not much there in that 1902 Popular Science or the 1994 New York Magazine, but I had hopes for the 1973 New York Magazine link. Snap! It was from an ad listing the sale of an "early Judaic ossuary." I missed my chance for fame and fortune, because just maybe it had some inscription on it... BUT, hey, I hit paydirt with the June 2007 issue of Atlanta. Okay, so maybe it's one more thing I don't have time to read...

Online Books in Biblical Studies: The Official List

Well, maybe not the "official" list, but this is as close as you are going to get. I've posted regularly on books that I or others have found in Google Books or Internet Archive that are worth downloading, but Bob Buller and Danny Zacharias have compiled the most complete list you are going to find. I received permission to be added as an editor, and I added a number of works they hadn't listed and provided something of an outline up front. (BTW, this was the first time I did any significant editing in Google Docs. Maybe it's because this is a big file, but I found it to be a real pain...) In any case, this is the page to bookmark:

Free Books in Biblical Studies and Related Fields
Google Books, Archive.org, & web-based content

Tools for creating your own web site

A bit off the main focus of this blog, but I regularly get questions about how one goes about setting up a web site and composing the pages. (This question is particularly asked with respect to churches getting set up on the web.) There a few parts that need to be considered.
I've addressed a number of issues on this page: Guides and Guidelines for a Church Web Site. I point to a number of great resources for thinking about and evaluating design. I also have a section on how one goes about getting a site and hosting matters, and I also raise some questions about the purpose and goals of a church web site.
Another matter is that of the software or tool used to actually create the page. I still use FrontPage2003 for basic stuff, but since Microsoft discontinued support for its extensions, I do not recommend it to anyone else. I've tried Microsoft Expression Web and some other tools, but your best bet is to check this excellent list of Web Authoring Tools and HTML Editors. Of the tools listed, some of the free ones will do a more than adequate job for most basic work, and of those, I highly recommend KompoZer. (Which isn't for now listed on that page, but KompoZer replaces and supersedes Nvu for which further development has been stopped.) KompoZer is available for Win, Mac, and Linux. Some additional links:

• You can download from the KompoZer home page or from CNET which also has a review of the program.
• KompoZer and Nvu User Guide
• How to design and publish your web site using KompoZer

It is, of course, a big step from a basic web page to one with all sorts of Flash or javascript stuff, but at that point, you are going to need a professional who is likely to be using Dreamweaver and other high end tools.

UPDATE: Well, you learn something every day on the web! Be sure to check out Tim's suggestion about using Wordpress over on SansBlogue. Who knew--other than Tim--that Wordpress has a Sermon Plugin and a mini-social networking tool.

Greek Search on Olive Tree iPhone Bible Reader

This Lamp reports that it is now possible to conduct searches in Greek on the beta of the Olive Tree iPhone Bible Reader. Check out the screen capture. Hebrew searching is still to come...

Place Based Computing, Pleiades, and other mapping stuff

William J. Turkel has been active in the field of "Digital History." One aspect of his work that has caught my attention is "Place-Based Computing." He is not really working with biblical history at all, but read how he describes his work, and think of how it might apply to work in locations associated with biblical events.

The convergence of handheld computing devices and GPS receivers makes it possible to augment any place with layers of digital information. This is place-based computing. It has the potential to radically change the way that we experience places and understand the past.

All of our research projects start from the premise that places are archives, and that by studying places it is possible to reconstruct past events. Some of this work is archival in a traditional sense, and builds on work in microhistory, the history of science and environmental history. Some is methodological, aimed at developing new techniques for extracting information from representations of places or from places themselves. Some is public history, designed to be presented to the public in the places that are being interpreted.

Quoting from the work of Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh in Mapping Hacks: Tips and Tools for Electronic Cartography (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005),

Imagine a world in which we can move about physical places, accessing not only what is stored in our brains but also multiple layers of information that have previously been inaccessible ...

Invisible layers of information that are arguably already implicitly available in the people and objects in a landscape will become visible and explicit. The relationship of physical and virtual objects will become obvious as well. We’ll be able to use a variety of devices to tap into geocoded text, images, media, and maps. Tags will link nearby objects to a universe of commentary on their history, value, safety, and meaning. Suddenly, any point in space will be able to be annotated, and those annotations aggregated.

Now think about what your next trip to Israel, Turkey, or Greece might be like with this kind of information available. I'm guessing we will be accessing such info using cell phones, PDAs, or netbook type devices, but it sounds as if the future will involve something more along the lines of holographic displays that can be toggled on/off. I.e., rather than interacting via a device, we will be able to interface more directly with the environment. The blending/confusion of real/virtual continues...

BTW, I regret that I forget the person's name whom I met at the Boston SBL (who teaches at a college in Wisconsin?), but he had a great idea on leading a trip for students to Turkey. Armed with GPS devices, they would try to locate roads from the biblical period and provide precise data in a field that is rather lacking.

And finally, the Pleiades Project...

... gives scholars, students and enthusiasts worldwide the ability to use, create and share historical geographic information about the Greek and Roman World.
Pleiades is a joint project of the AWMC Ancient World Mapping Center, the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. It brings together a global community of scholars, students and enthusiasts to expand and enhance continually the information originally assembled by the Classical Atlas Project (1988-2000) to support the publication of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (R.J.A. Talbert, ed., Princeton, 2000). Our name, "Pleiades" (the daughters of Atlas in Greek Mythology) reflects both this heritage and the forward-looking goal of collaborative diversification.

If you simply want to check out what is available, start here at the "Places" section. Keep in mind that this is work in progress, so you won't find every location, and it is based with classical and not biblical interests in mind. I found this KML file of all the ancient places in Pleiades which will open in Google Earth, and you will see that that the main work has been done in what is now south central Turkey and northern Libya. It is an ambitious project that is cataloging places, place types (e.g., bridge, temple, spring), names, and time periods. There is bibliographical data provided with references to the Barrington and other atlases, latitude/longitude info, and sometimes a KML link for Google Earth or the inclusion on the page of a Google Map. Here are some biblical locations I checked: Perga in Acts 13:13, Attalea in Acts 14:25, Patara in Acts 21:21, and Myra in Acts 27:4.

There is also some info available on the wiki where work is ongoing, and a little poking around and a few clicks down the line turned up some interesting stuff.

• A 2006 paper by Tom Elliott, "Beyond the Barrington Atlas"
• A very partial view of the Barrington Atlas
• On the Stoa Consortium site, a fascinating article by Farland Hart Stanley Jr. on "Flavius Josephus and the Archaeological Evidence for Caesarea Maritima" and an excellent section with lots of text and photos on the The Ancient City of Athens

Using digital mapping tools: Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim

Todd Bolen has a neat posting on "The Acoustics of Mounts Gerizim and Ebal." In reference to the account in Joshua 8:30-35, Todd cites an acoustic experiment conducted in 1879 by McGarvey and retold in his book, Lands of the Bible. Based on his description and on the picture provided by Todd, I wanted to see what this would look like in one of the 3D digital tools now available. Above is a screen shot from Google Earth with Ebal on the left and Gerizim on the right, looking east. Below is the same view using HolyLand 3D with contour tinting enabled, and at the bottom is one from Microsoft Virtual Earth.
All three views clearly show the amphitheather-like nature of the location, but GoogleEarth looks to have the most detailed data/imagery.
UPDATE: Be sure to check out Ferrell's Travel Blog with this post on McGarvey's book and the Gerizim/Ebal incident. His post also has a link to McGarvey's Lands of the Bible book entirely online. Thanks!

BibleWorks8 Previews

BibleWorks8 plans to be released before Christmas and at least before the new year. In the meantime, Michael Hanel has been posting a great series of reviews based on a pre-release version. He has described:

1. New automatic update feature
2. Bagster’s Daily Light inclusion and integration
3. Morphologically tagged Greek Pseudepigrapha with new translation by Craig Evans
4. New Phrase Matching Tool
5. Expanded cross-referencing resources
6. New Browse Window Tab in Analysis Window
7. Inclusion of Greek/Hebrew grammars by Wallace, Waltke-O’Connor and Joüon-Muraoka
8. MacDonald Greek Textual Transcription
9. New Context Tab
10. New Related Verses Tool
11. Addition of texts from Early Church Fathers series
12. New resource: Rodkinson translation of the Babylonian Talmud
13. ERMIE: External Resources Manager
14. Wordlist Tab in the Analysis Window
    

BW8 looks to be a very nice upgrade.

Logos for Mac now shipping

Logos is officially now shipping its Mac version.

Firefox Addons for Researching and Organizing

I've found a few Firefox addons that have proven useful.
Sifrei Kodesh: If you know Hebrew, this is a very helpful addon. Aaron Sarna, the author describes it:

Combining the power of Firefox, Google and the Mechon Mamre text library, this extension allows you to search the Hebrew texts of Tana"ch, Mishna, Talmud Bavli, Talmud Yerushalmi, Tosefta and Mishna Torah. You can search as broadly as all of these sources or as specifically as a single book of Tana"ch, a single tractate of Mishna or a single set of Halachot of the Mishnah Torah. The extension includes an onscreen Hebrew keyboard to assist those who do not know the Hebrew keyboard layout and/or do not have Hebrew input support on their machines. (You can use this keyboard to copy and paste Hebrew text into other things also).

This is still in development. There are many more features to come, including morphological search, search term highlighting and find in page. Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

The site describes a bit more, but (for now) it doesn't have the latest version that works under Firefox 3. Get the latest version HERE. After you install it, it wasn't immediately clear to me how to get to it. It is available through the Tools menu, but what I did is right click somewhere on the menu bar of Firefox, select Customize, find the Sifrei Kodesh icon, and drag it to a toolbar.
SimplyBox: This is a handy tool for clipping and organizing. There is a nice video on the site, but basically you draw around whatever part of the screen you want to save. You can then either email it directly through SimplyBox or organize it into 'boxes' that you create. It requires a free account. Instead of the toolbar taking up room, I choose simply to keep it as an icon in my status bar of Firefox and click for it whenever I need it.
Juice: "Juice is an intelligent discovery engine that integrates seamlessly with your browser.
Highlight and move a chunk of text, and Juice directly delivers a set of rich, relevant content to you." Still in beta, but it works fine. The interesting thing here is that you search on a "chunk of text," not just a word or two. It does natural language processing to try to figure out what the text is about and returns results based on it. You can leave it closed, and I set it to open when I drag a block of text over to the side, and then it opens the sidebar. You can choose Google, Yahoo, or LiveSearch as the engine, and results can be bookmarked and organized. Give it a try on some biblical text! Here I pulled up Mark 4.30-32 from the oremus Bible Browser, highlighted the text, dragged to the side, and the juice sidebar opened. It provides a variety of web results (web, images, news, videos, blogs), and you can see from the images it found that it picked up "mustard" and "Jesus teaching" as key elements.
UPDATE: I have just uninstalled Juice after a couple days. I'll check it again later, but for now, it brought my browser to a crawl. Memory usage jumped from Firefox's usual max of ~250Kb footprint to over 1Mb. Uninstalled Juice and things are back to speed.
UPDATE: In light of a question asked in the comments, the oremus Bible Browser is a standalone, online service. I like it because it offers the NRSV. BUT, the way I usually access it is through my Firefox search box. Check this post, and grab the OpenSearchFox plugin. It adds an "Add OpenSearch plugin" to your menu. Click on any search box on the oremus or any other page, and it automatically adds it to your list of search options.

More books to download, sites to bookmark

Continuing some previous posts on books to download (HERE and HERE and HERE), here are some more recommended books worth downloading:

• At Philonica and Neotestamentica, there is a good list of books related to Philo.
• Frederick Field, Notes on the Translation of the NT (1899)
• Thackeray's A Grammar of the Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint, Vol. 1, Introduction, Orthography and Accidence (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1909)
• A Treatise on the Grammar of New Testament Greek by Georg Benedikt Winer, William Fiddian Moulton
  
• Nigel Turner, Grammatical Insights into the NT (2004) limited view
  

Some sites you may want to bookmark that either have texts or provide reviews include:

• The very useful Early Christian Writings (or try this link) and Early Jewish Writings sites (or try this link) do not look like they will be coming back. If you click on those title links, however, you can still access them from the Internet Archive. (HT: Mark Goodacre < Phil Harland)
• The Review of Biblical Literature site now has over 5000 books reviewed.
• The Denver Seminary has good listings for: Annotated OT Bibliography 2008 and New Testament Exegesis Bibliography 2008.
• I also find that I often check the Logos Product Guides on such topics as: Cultural and Historical Background of the Bible, Multi-Volume Commentaries, and Comments on Commentaries.
• Here is a helpful post by Phil Gons on commentaries which includes a pointer to the excellent BestCommentaries site.
• I've also pulled together some bibliography resources HERE, including these: Recommended OT Commentaries.pdf and Recommended NT Commentaries.pdf

Testing Apture, a blogging enhancement tool

I may end up deleting this post, but I wanted to try a few things with a blogging tool called Apture.

Apture provides the first rich communication platform allowing publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat pages of text into multimedia experiences.

So, let me try a few biblically related items and see what you think.

• Jerusalem
• Moses
• Jesus
  
• Gospel of Mark
• Parables of Jesus
• Mustard seed
• Mark 4:30-32

Note that I have only typed the terms above, and after posting this blog, I will use Apture to link additional content.

REPORT: That was pretty easy. Click on (or hover over) any of the titles to see the variety of attached links I created. The only one that didn't really work was the "Mark 4:30-32" one, because I already have RefTagger from Logos active on my blog.
SO, if you want to easily spice up your blog with a variety of linked content, give Apture a try.

UPDATE in light of comments:

1. You can tell the links that I created using Apture because they have a little book icon in front of them.
2. I have noticed as well that all the links don't always show up. They do take a moment after the page is loaded, but a couple times now, the Jerusalem, Moses, and Jesus links haven't shown up.
3. Hovering over the links will cause the popup, but there is a delay so you can pass over the link without necessarily causing the popup. Clicking anywhere outside the popup causes it to disappear.
4. Clicking on a link in the popup will either generate another popup or open in another tab.
5. The Apture links do not show up in my RSS reader. I use Google Reader, and I recommend the Firefox addon Better GReader. It allows you to see the actual web page without leaving your reader. Apture links do show up when this is used.
   

(HT: Robin Good)

Biblioblogger of the Month!

Well, my teenage daughters aren't bragging about it to anyone, but I am honored to report that I am "Biblioblogger of the Month" of December. Thanks to Brandon Wason for giving me the opportunity to be interviewed. You should note the theme of appreciation for the teachers I have had along the way. I am thankful for them and thankful that I have the opportunity to be teaching now myself.

New online search sites for academics

A couple new search sites have emerged that are intended for more serious, academic work. RefSeek is fully functioning, and in searching for biblically related stuff, it does return results one would hope to see and does omit a lot of junk. ReferenceExtract is still in development.

RefSeek (rĕf-sēk) is a web search engine for students and researchers. RefSeek aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.

Rference Extract (aka RefEx or REX) is envisioned as a web search engine, like Google, Yahoo and MSN. However, unlike other search engines, Reference Extracts will be built for maximum credibility by relying on the expertise and credibility judgments of librarians from around the globe. Users will enter a search term and get results weighted towards sites most often referred to by librarians at institutions such as the Library of Congress, the University of Washington, the State of Maryland, and over 1,400 libraries worldwide. This grant will support planning for Reference Extract and building the foundation necessary to implement it as a large-scale, general user service.

(HT: Dan Cohen)

Monday at SBL

Notes from today (before I get on an overnight train to get back home...)

I was first up in the Computer Assisted Research Group today with my presentation on "Digital Resources for Biblical Mapping." I have a 'metapage' of biblical mapping resources, and if you check under Presentations, you can download a PDF handout of my presentation or check out the Quick Summary. I'd like to think it was well enough received by the 25 or so people in attendance.

Thomas Naef from the University of Lausanne described the workings of BiBIL.net and some anticipated upgrades. BiBIL is:

BiBIL (Biblical Bibliography of Lausanne) is the bibliographical database produced by the University of Lausanne's Institut romand des sciences bibliques (IRSB – Insitute for Biblical Studies of the French speaking part of Switzerland). It offers the scholar reliable, constantly increased and freely available information on publications in the field of Biblical research.

Close to 90,000 [corrected: not 9000] articles/titles are indexed at this time provided by a number of European publishers (including Sheffield Phoenix). It is very much worth checking out, and note especially the way that searches can conducted. If you type in a biblical book name in the book box, then click on the I info icon next to it and note the specificity with which you can select biblical chapters/verses to search that are included in their database. This is one of
the few sites where you can search on Greek or Hebrew terms. Try clicking in a couple of Hebrew/Greek letters, and then click on the Info icon to see what words match. Very nice! Also be sure to click on the Thesaurus button to see the categories and texts into which articles are organized and the number of articles available for each. The only problem? I found 6 articles I had not known about that now I should probably read for a book I'm writing. (Sometimes ignorance is bliss...)
Thomas also has a great collection of links on his personal site, especially for texts, online journals, bibliographies, and other resources related to biblical studies. Definitely worth checking.
Kent Clarke from Trinity Western University describe what is happening with "The BibleWorks Biblical Manuscript Transcription and Collation Project." He is going to send me a screen shot, and I will say more about this later.

Sonya Kostana at the University of Alberta demonstrated the online Journal of Hebrew
Scriptures now released in XML format as compared to earlier HTML. It is an open access journal that is fully Unicode. She showed the great advantages of searching XML docs with the embedded metadata as compared to HTML searches which are basically text only searches. Use the XML search here.
You can choose author, title, Bible reference, etc, then select always for an AND search or leave the middle box blank for an OR search, then start typing a term in the last box. As you type a dropdown box will indicate matching terms and the number of articles for each. After running a search, depending on the results, you will be able to see hits in the document, a review of the document, or (if available) the document itself. The beauty of XML is not yet exhausted.
Within the article, you will see hyperlinks to authors or biblical texts which have embedded XML data that can be linked out to further resources. Here, for example, is what pops up when clicking on a biblical text reference.
Another outstanding resource...

Enough for now... Met a bunch of interesting people, and this SBL meeting was a great time for learning and networking.

Logos: Searching for Long Sentences

A guest post by Tim Bahula, ardent Logos user

The Bible software showdown continues! When I read Rod Decker's article on finding complex sentences in Mark using Accordance, a spark was kindled. But not having a particular interest in complex sentences, in Mark, or in Accordance, it faded. When I read MVGH's article on doing the same search in Bibleworks, I knew that I need to try my hand at it in Logos.

Even though I've heard rave reviews about using Bibleworks for biblical research, my only experience with it was just after I completed my M.Div. in 1992. At the time I was a poor struggling graduate and couldn't justify the expense of Bible study software. When I had money a few years later, I purchased Logos Bible software and have since made a significant investment in adding library resources. So I want to make it work.

My search approach was spawned by a comment made by Mike on MVGH's entry. He suggested,

"I do think it could be done with a graphical query though, since Logos also allows crossing verse boundaries."

My method was to use a graphical query to find any two words in the same sentence separated by 50 or more words. This search is easy and fast to set up, it runs fast, and it produces accurate results that are easy to interpret and screen.

If you just want the results, the search returns Mark 2:25-26; 3:7-8; 4:31-32; 5:2-4; 5:25-27; 6:7-9; 7:2-5a; 10:29b-30; 10:32b-34; 13:14-16.

If you want to run it for yourself, you can download the graphical query here. You'll need these parameters in the search dialog:



Here are the steps to follow.

1. Open the Gramcord NA 27
2. Start a graphical query using from the menu: File > New > Graphical Query - Provide the name you want and hit OK
3. Drag a TERM object into the search window
4. When the dialog opens, select Language = Greek, Term = * > OK
5. Repeat the previous two steps to create a second TERM object identical to the first
6. Now draw a line from the first (left-most) object to the second (right-most) object (If you haven't drawn lines before, it is a matter of moving your cursor near an object until a gray arrowhead appears and then dragging it to the desired object to be connected)
7. Double-click on the line just created
8. In the dialogue, set your proximity to "At least 50 intervening" > OK
9. Click on the Search icon at the top left > When the Advanced Search dialogue box opens, make sure you are using Nestle-Aland 27 with Gramcord; select to search By: Special and choose Sentence; limit your range to a Bible Text, and type in a single book (in this case, Mark) >> Hit Search
10. On my older PentiumM, 1.86Ghz with 2Gb RAM WinXP system, the search took about 2 minutes to run

FWIW, after I worked on this method MVGH posted another article with a workable Logos solution developed by Logos' own Vincent Setterholm. It uses the mysterious (to me anyway) "filter object" and the results are less than accessible:

Do not be dismayed if it looks like you only get one hit! Click on "Concordance at the top right of the box, then sort "By reference." The verses listed indicate the end of a sentence just prior to a sentence with 50+ words. (Note Vincent's observation above about 'words' in in the graphical query editor. I.e., there will be some sentences with less than 50 words.)
Now click on one of the references to open up the NA27 text.You will have to scan through the results, but note that there are colored markers to indicate the major stop before a long sentence and a different colored marker at the end of the sentence. (emphasis added)

My method described above avoids all of these problems except for the "word" count problem inherent in Logos. MVGH also highlighted the way that Logos handles the semi-colon, which will affect the results returned.