The Logos Bible Software Blog
In my work as a Logos Pro, I sometimes hear users say, with a resigned, apologetic tone, “I probably use only 5 percent of the capabilities of Logos.” People with lots of responsibility, lots of training, lots of gifting, and lots of experience in ministry or scholarship (or both) all of the sudden grow bashful and embarrassed. They stare at the floor like it’s report card day. They crawl into nearby holes.
John Newton wrote a beautiful letter to a friend which is called in his collected works, “On Controversy”—because that friend was about to engage in public controversy over Christian doctrine; Newton wanted to give him some scriptural counsel. I have read it 20 times over nearly as many years, and thought of it countless more. In order to more fully get the principles into my own soul—because I, frankly, have not always lived up to them—I have taken the liberty of “transculturating” it for today’s Christian SMWs—Social Media Warriors. If Newton were to write the same letter today, this is my guess as to what he would write:
The Figurative Language dataset in Logos marks the word “dine” in Luke 14:1 as a metaphor. Why?
Can you figure it out? I’ll give you ten Logos Pro points if you get the right answer.
One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully.
In a previous post, I showed Logos users how to automatically mark all figurative language in the New Testament with blue text. I’ve kept that visual filter on for my own Bible study, and that’s why I myself recently ran across this little puzzle.
I cringe almost every time I hear a preacher criticize a particular phrase from an English Bible translation in preaching—even and especially those times when I caught myself doing it before I could stop myself. We preachers and Bible teachers would do better not to publicly correct the Bible translations on people’s laps.
Here are three reasons why.
Why should Bible teachers go through the pain of learning and then using the original languages of Scripture? I gave you five reasons last week, but persuasion doesn’t occur solely because of reasons. Sometimes personal testimony is most effective. So here are five more, non-standard, non-reason reasons for learning the original languages.
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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.