Logos 4: Visual Filter for the Greek Words Translated Temple

Today’s post is from Morris Proctor, certified and authorized trainer for Logos Bible Software. Morris, who has trained thousands of Logos users at his two-day Camp Logos seminars, provides many training materials.

In an ideal world, you and I would masterfully read Hebrew and Greek, the Bible’s original languages. If you’re like I am, though, you’re thankful for and dependent on English translations of the Bible. When reading our English Bibles, however, we must always keep in mind that the same English word could be the translation of various Hebrew or Greek words. For example, Mark 14:49 and 14:58 both refer to the temple, but two different Greek words are being translated by the one English word, temple.

Can Logos help identify different original words behind the same English word? Thankfully, the answer is yes. A Visual Filter can “read” the underlining Hebrew or Greek word and then highlight the English translation any way we like.

• Open a Bible containing the reverse interlinear option (such as the ESV, NASB, LEB, or NKJV) to a passage like Mark 14:49.
• Right-click the word temple. (1)
• Select Lemma “the Greek word” | Search this resource. (2)
• Click Make Filter on the search panel that just opened with results. (3)
• Name the Visual Filter that opened. (4)
• Click the Formatting drop-down list to the right of the Greek search string. (5)
• Select a highlighting style, such as Double Box. (6)
• Navigate in the Bible to a different passage, like Mark 14:58. (7)
• Right-click the word temple. (8)
• Select Lemma “the Greek word” | Search this resource. (9)
• Copy–paste the entire search string from the Search panel to the Find box in the Visual Filter panel. (10)
• Click the Formatting drop-down list to the right of the Greek search string that was just pasted. (11)
• Select a highlighting style, such as Box. (12)

Return to the Bible. The word temple (hieron) in Mark 14:49 should have a double box around it and the word temple (naos) in Mark 14:58 should have a single box around it! Try doing this for the different Hebrew words translated praise or sing and the different Greek words translated love, life, or poor.

Of course, we still have to investigate the meaning of each original word, but this Logos feature helps us not automatically assign the same meaning to an English word every time we see it in the Bible.