The Siberian Grinder

Do word studies often? One might be surprised at how much Bible software speeds these sorts of tasks up. In preparation to teach the significance of communion, I launched into 1 Corinthians 11:23-34. I naturally paused long at the word ἀνάμνησις (anamnesis – remembrance) in v. 24. A couple of clicks later I had before me a full-scale Bible word study report (click here to see it in PDF); a great starting point in my quest.

Now, how long would that have taken using only print materials? To figure it out, I set a stopwatch and went for my Greek-English paper dictionary and looked up the word ἀνάμνησις. Altogether (including the trip to the bookcase, finding the volume, etc.), it took me just over a minute (68 seconds) to get to the article. That is how long it took me to find one entry in one dictionary. Logos 3 bookmarked 15 reference books in 14 seconds! By hand, that would have taken – at bare minimum – 17 minutes. So far, I’ve saved 16 minutes, 46 seconds and a whole lot of desk space.

Then my computer spent 30 seconds (which seemed long for some reason) analyzing the grammatical relationships of the 4 sentences where ἀνάμνησις occurs in the NT. This makes it possible to effortlessly learn when ἀνάμνησις was used as a subject and when as an object; the words that qualify it, etc. I guestimate that to similarly analyze the grammar of one of the four sentences where this word occurs would likely take me around 20 minutes – and maybe more (maybe a lot more, depending on the complexity of the sentence and time elapsed since last caffeine intake). Logos has thus far saved me more than 1 & ½ hours. I’ll only mention that the program also found and morphologically identified every occurrence of the word in the GNT, the LXX and Philo.

Of course, this was actually just the set up work for the real word study. Once all those bookmarks are in place, I still have much to do the old fashion way; consult and study the relevant passages, read the dictionary entries and articles, etc. Nevertheless, using Bible software like Logos 3 saves a great deal of time; making room to write useless blog posts before shutting everything down for the night.