Mark WardJohn 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 no longer capitalize deity pronouns in Christian writing and in (most) Bible translations. Shall we take this out back? I...
Everyone knows the King James Version of the Bible 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”...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Good Bible readers have lots of questions. I wonder what other OT verses the author of Hebrews cites? Where was that other question Peter asked Jesus, the one I just read the other day? I wonder how often the NT authors refer to the fall of Adam...
It’s the question that can derail the Sunday School class, make the pastor look poorly educated (i.e., “dumb”), and possibly even damage someone’s faith: Pastor, how come this footnote says that some manuscripts do not include the story of the woman...
Now that Bible software is a standard tool for ministry and for academic biblical studies, Bible software training has become a necessary part of the seminary curriculum. Major seminaries across the country and the world, such as Dallas, Moody, and...
You’re reading along in Philippians and your eyes traverse Paul’s famous phrase, “our citizenship is in heaven.” Your job, Bible student or teacher, is to understand this metaphor well enough to explain it to others. But at first, it may not feel...
Have you ever been listening to a preacher who is using a Bible translation different from the one in your lap? Generally, the wording is similar enough to avoid confusion; in fact those differences often provide little insights. But occasionally...
Your brain has already learned one of the most basic Bible study skills: finding connections. When you’re reading an ending to one of Paul’ letters, maybe you hear a faint echo. You think, “Didn’t Paul say something like this at the end of...
Love of God and neighbor are the two great commandments upon which everything else in the Bible hangs—and, interestingly, the Bible happens to be the only book in the world written by both God and neighbor. So, for Christians, love drives...
You can search for just about anything inside—or near or not near or intersecting or before or within four words of—just about anything else in Logos. You can even search particular highlighting styles. I’m becoming a broken broken record record...
Your library is an information filter that is itself the product of information filtering. You filtered out all the other books in the world to buy these books, and now, hopefully, they filter out all the information available in the world to tell...
You can preach excellent messages using the technology of a yellow legal pad. You can then shift those notes to Word. You can then create a PowerPoint. You can then email that PowerPoint, or put it on a thumb drive, and get it to your church sound...
We may hate to admit it, but if we’re honest with ourselves, even our favorite English Bible translations can at times be clunky. Here’s an example I was just teaching about in adult Sunday School. Check out the three phrases I bolded: “your work of...
Neutrality is a myth. Put in biblical terms, either you love the Lord or you don’t. Every thought you think, every choice you make, every word you say, flows from that heart and is determined by its fundamental direction, whether toward God or away...
Postmodern literary theorists are favorite whipping boys in evangelical hermeneutics textbooks, and Stanley Fish is no exception (although Fish prefers the title “antifoundationalist”). This makes Winning Arguments, the latest book from the former...
Christianity cannot be boiled down to a list of words—say, positive character qualities to be cultivated and opposite, negative qualities to be avoided. Virtue and vice lists by themselves can’t handle the complexities of life. Some loves in...
The Bible speaks in some way to anything you can think of, but it doesn’t speak explicitly to everything you can think of.b In other words, the Bible never uses the term “work ethic,” but it does tell us to do all to the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31)...
I recently had the chance to sit down with Shaun Tabatt and discuss Logos Bible Software. We talked about some of my favorite features in Logos, as well as the all-important issue of how to pronounce “Logos.” Mark L. Ward, Jr. received...
I’m not opposed to using the scenic route down the coast from work to home; I’ve taken it multiple times. But never on a workday, always on a Saturday. I’m not opposed to using the scenic route in Bible study, either. I’ve taken it multiple times...