Help for search please: How do you search for something like "in Christ"?

Hello there,

Till now I've mostly got by because I know exactly what book I need and what I'm looking for. However with quite a large library and having to do a study on something like Paul's use of the phrase "in Christ" - where both the words individiually and together are so common - any ideas on how you do it effectively in Logos 6 please? How do I locate particular articles that might be there hidden in some book which I'm not aware of?

Thanks!

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Rosie Perera

I would try the following search:

Paul WITHIN 3 words "phrase in Christ"

This will limit it to times when an author is talking specifically about the phrase "in Christ" in that formulation, so it might miss some instances, but it will most likely not give you any false hits. Logos doesn't pay any attention to punctuation in its searches, and you have to put the quotation marks around the whole "phrase in Christ" but it will find places where there are quotation marks around "in Christ" with the word "phrase" in front of it.

You can tweak the 3 to 4 or 5 if you're not getting enough hits.

Here's the sort of hit I'm getting in my Library for this:

Leo Rajiv Michael

That worked well! Thank you:-)

Would you also be able to direct me to any posts/help files on available list of commands for search etc pls?

Thanks again.

Francis

There are several approaches you can take to this search:

1. Do a basic search for the words "in Christ" with quotation marks to ensure that the search returns the expression, not the individual words in and Christ. You can then sort the results in the way that would allow you to find what you are looking for. You can rank them to get most occurrences or go by resource to pick the kind of books that will most likely be pertinent.

2. The problem with the search above is it will return every text where the expression occurs and this may only be mentioned once and not be the topic under discussion. One approach to looking for more targeted results is to narrow the "search in" options from "all text" to "Large text, headings, topics, titles". This will bring up articles that have "in Christ" as part of the subject matter.

3. Another targeted approach consists in looking for key references appearing together in a resource. You can do <Ephesians 1:3> AND <Ephesians 1:12> AND <Philippians 1:26> for instance (basic search, all text). The PassageList search can be put to use here but is a bit more difficult. You can read on it if you want to on the forum here: https://community.logos.com/forums/t/92765.aspx. Otherwise just use something like the suggestion above.

4. Another approach is to go topical. Run passage guide on a key passage, look into the topic section for a topic that corresponds to "in Christ" (for instance, incorporation in Christ), click on that entry or these entries to explore the topic. "In Christ" is also a topic found in the Topic Guide. In the picture below, you can see that it includes a link to Factbook for more hits yet and suggests alternate search terms such as "in the Lord" or "in Jesus". All these will produce relevant material.

MJ. Smith

That worked well! Thank you:-)

Would you also be able to direct me to any posts/help files on available list of commands for search etc pls?

Thanks again.

https://wiki.logos.com/Search_HELP and the related pages shown in the upper right under see also

Leo Rajiv Michael

Thanks all, been a huge help - and so quickly! you guys are great!