How Easy is it in BibleWorks?

[bkjones]

In Metzgers Textual Commentary on the New Testament on John 3:15 he saysthe 4th evangelist always uses eis after pisteuein (34 times), never en except in John 3 :15. How easy is this to confirm in BibleWorks. I am not doubting him just asking if you can show how easy this is in BibleWorks. I am considering purchasing this program. Thanks. If possible please show screenshots.

[MGVH]

Well, actually there is a very easy (but not precise) way and a more complicated (but more accurate) way.

In either case:

Use the BGM (or BNM) morphological Greek version (on command line) > bgm ENTER
Limit your search to John > L joh ENTER

Here's where it can get a bit vague... If you had a syntactically tagged text you could probably work out an exact search of all instances where the verb pisteuw has eis (w/ object) as its object.

In BW, here's the quick and easy way. With a somewhat limited search focus as this one is, you could just do a search for pisteuw and eis > .πιστευω εις ENTER
This will return 58 hits in 39 verses, but some of those would be false hits where the eis wasn't connected with the pisteuw. Still, that's not many to search through and you could quickly scan through the results and uncheck the false hits to create an accurate list.

Another way to think about this is that you want the phrase pisteuw eis, so you could use a phrase search and use the same search as the previous one except start with an apostrophe instead of a period (34 hits in 32 verses)
But... then you realize that that phrase search only finds instances of the two words together in that order. There might be a few words in between, so you can add in a wild card and pick, arbitrarily, 5 words > 'πιστευω *5 εις
Now you have 40 hits in 33 verses.
But... you now realize that it is possible in Greek for the eis prepositional clause to precede the verb, so you want to allow for either order, so use: >> ('πιστευω *5 εις) / ('εις *5 πιστευω) ENTER
This results in 46 in 35 verses as you can see below.

A quick scan of those results shows only 2 false verse hits (20.8, 25). Some of the hits are due to multiple uses of the verb or preposition in the verse, and each is counted even if it does not match your intended search. We do, however, pick up instances like 12.44, however, where the verb is used twice but there are actually 3 prepositionally phrases used as objects. We also get 17.20 where the prepositional phrase is 4 words away from the verb. And we also get 14.1 where the Greek has "believe eis God and eis me believe."

With just a little more work, you can use the Graphical Search Engine. Shortcut hint: type in the command line the previous search but instead of hitting ENTER, click on Tools in the green bar just below the command line and select Graphical Search Engine. You can add ordering and do more sophisticated searches. I've attached the file that you can open in the GSE.

You can do the same thing looking for pisteuw and en, but here it's just fastest and easiest to search for: .pisteuw en
Only 18 verses are returned, so it's easy to scan those and see that John 3.15 is the one case Metzger noted. You will also see John 16.30 where ἐν τούτῳ πιστεύομεν does not mean "in this we believe" but "by (because of) this we believe."

[Michael Hanel]

It's so easy that it actually takes more time and effort to take the screen caps and post them than it does to execute the various searches So thanks, Mark, for your post. His solution is quite elegant. Another possible solution that I thought of was to use the KWIC tool. You can search the morphology version for the verb πιστεύω and then configure it to show words that occur on either side of the verb. In this case, I was only interested in words that occurred after, but I could see not just which prepositions occurred, but also any other words. Obviously this gives you more information than you initially asked for, but it may help you see the big picture. I also had to check to make sure the option to search across verse boundaries was off because that was giving results that I really wasn't interested in.

If you're interested in how the KWIC tool works, you can read about it here.

[bkjones]

Thanks (to both of you) so much for taking the time to write a thorough answer to my question. Curently taking textual criticism class with Dr. Maurice Robinson and we are looking at and discussing issues pertaining to the different manuscripts. How much help is this feature in BW and also I believe the CNNTS is a tool BW has as well. Do you find these useful?

[Michael Hanel]

Thanks (to both of you) so much for taking the time to write a thorough answer to my question. Curently taking textual criticism class with Dr. Maurice Robinson and we are looking at and discussing issues pertaining to the different manuscripts. How much help is this feature in BW and also I believe the CNNTS is a tool BW has as well. Do you find these useful?

You will find no better program for textual criticism via manuscript study than BibleWorks 9. Only Accordance is close because they offer original manuscript packages and CNTTS, but based on what I've read, BibleWorks is better in this department because 1) you get all the tools in one package (you don't have to buy extra resources) and 2) you get not only the transcription of the famous manuscripts, but also images that are very tightly integrated and imaging tools in order to better examine the images yourself. And then there is CNTTS too. In my opinion, it puts tools in the hands of users that not even those in the textual criticism field had until very recently.

You can see a video of the CNTTS in action here. Here's one that talks about some of the Mss stuff.

Be sure to thank Maurice Robinson for his great work in this field. He does excellent work and he does it all without tying it down with expensive licensing costs etc. He's a model of a churchman and a scholar.