The Logos Bible Software Blog
Want to see all the free Logos books you don’t already have?
Want to see what Logos books are on sale?
Want to see what’s cheap?
One of our users in the Logos forums recently shared with other users the links he uses to check all these things (and more) periodically on Logos.com. Here’s his full post. I’ll share with you a few of the highlights.
Should pastors and other Bible teachers bother to learn Greek and Hebrew? You can use Greek and Hebrew without having to memorize a single paradigm, let alone 3,000 vocab words, so why torture yourself?
I’ll give you ten reasons studying the original languages is worth the pain, five this week and five next.
Do you ever need to perform searches that connect English with Greek? For example, do you ever need to find out how a specific translation treats a given grammatical construction?
This is nearly impossible to do without the specialized tagging in Logos.
As a pastor or Bible teacher, you probably copy portions of the Bible into sermons, blog posts, academic papers, or Bible study notes all the time.
Recently I had a very specific Bible-copying need: I had to have the entire KJV New Testament text, one chapter at a time, with one verse per line, a verse number in front of each line, then a space, and no other formatting—no book names, italics chapter numbers, extra hard returns, footnotes, headings, nothing.
If you want to start a fight, meddle with people’s religion and their grammar at the same time.
Here goes: I think it’s time to drop the practice of capitalizing deity pronouns in Christian writing and in (most) Bible translations.
Shall we take this out back?
I feel the weight behind this tradition because I, too, live to honor God and I, too, want to write good English prose.
But we should still let the custom drop. Not only does it muddy our communication with the uninitiated, a similar tradition has robbed us of the knowledge of how to pronounce God’s name.
Everyone knows the KJV was translated in 1611, but almost no one has read a 1611 KJV. Not only do the great majority of KJV editions actually come from a 1769 revision (one of a series of revisions), but even the “1611” editions available online are not perfect representations of the intentions of the KJV translators.
In an era before computers, typographical errors were introduced into the very first printed editions of the King James Bible. Subsequent printers and editors over a century and a half built up their own patina of miscellaneous, minor alterations on top of the KJV, until the text we now generally use was established by Oxford’s Benjamin Blayney almost 250 years ago.
The American evangelical church likes to ride pendulum swings. I’m not talking about the revolving door of theologically vapid church marketing gimmicks. I mean things that you and I do. You know, us: the kind of people who read Bible software blogs, who take biblical study and doctrine seriously.
In the most recent issue of Themelios—a theological journal you can get for free in Logos—Dane Ortlund helps us arrest one particularly powerful pendulum swing. His article, “Reflections on Handling the Old Testament as Jesus Would Have Us: Psalm 15 as a Case Study,” addresses the “remarkable resurgence of Christocentric interpretation,” an “impulse to resist moralistic and graceless readings” of Scripture. The relatively recent popularity of biblical theology and of “gospel-centeredness” are also part of this particular pendulum swing.
The evangelical tradition that gives me the most courage to be Protestant in this 500th anniversary of the Reformation is our emphasis on personal Bible study.
But how do you create a church culture that truly loves Bible study?
Faithlife has just released Logos 7 Basic, a new free version of Logos Bible Software. Not only is this the perfect introduction to Logos for pastors and church leaders, it’s something you can put in the hands of your people. It’s a tool that can help you create a Bible-study-loving culture in your church.
Here are three ways how.
Even professors who teach biblical languages typically teach just one of those languages. They must put forth some effort to maintain their skills in the language they don’t teach. Pastors, too, must take practical steps to retain their knowledge of and facility with Greek and Hebrew. One practical thing I have done for 15 years now is to keep my Greek and Hebrew Bibles (including the LXX) open every time I look at the Scripture text. Doing so has helped me keep my Greek and Hebrew from growing rusty.
There’s a simple way to make sure the original languages are always visible to you in your Bible study: creating a virtual Greek/Hebrew Bible in Logos. Let me show you how and why you should do it.
Most of the time you look up a Hebrew word you probably don’t want the extreme depth and complication afforded by the top lexicons. Neither do you want to wade through a tight paragraph of tiny print full of abbreviations you don’t use often enough to remember. Paper lexicons were not designed for easy reading but for saving ink and paper.