Verbum Search through Tip of the Day #9

MJ. Smith

Tip 9: Interesting cases of Biblical personal name Search Part 4

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This tip will consider another type of personal names that cause problems for a Basic text argument Bible personal name Search:

1. [See Tip 4] When a person’s name is also a common word i.e. used both as a proper noun and a common word, the text search cannot accurately select the person’s name: an example, “Job” and the employment “job”.
2. [See Tip 5] When a person’s name changes in their lifetime: an example, Abram, Abraham
3. [See Tip 6] When multiple people share a name: an example, Mary, Mother of Jesus; Mary Magdalene; Mary of Bethany; Mary, mother of John Mark . . .
4. When a person has a compound name, each part of which is independently the name of other people: an example, John Mark
5. When a supernatural person was unknown when early scripture was written: an example, Holy Spirit.

When one opens a Search Panel, one receives some basic hints on Search. The hints vary by the type of Search. Here is the opening page for a Basic Search:

1. There is a warning, highlighted in orange (1), that states the Search is currently unreliable because the application is indexing. If you see this warning, believe it.
2. Under Search Helps, it says to put phrases (more than a single word) in quote marks. Since John Mark is two words, the search argument should be “John Mark”.

Follow the instructions – wait for the warning to close, enter “John Mark”, then run the search.

To my surprise, no results are returned. This raises the question “If the NRSV has no occurrences of ‘John Mark’, how does the NRSV refer to this person?” To answer that question, take the following steps:

• Step 1: Search a range of Bibles
• Step 2: Find a reference that does include “John Mark”
• Step 3: Look that reference up in the NRSV to see how it handles John Mark.

Use the resource auto-complete to switch resources from NRSV to “Top Bibles”. What Bibles are the Top Bibles? The first five Bibles in your priority list. If you have not prioritized five Bibles, the application will fall back to its own default priority list.

Make the change by selecting “Top Bibles”. Rerun the search.

1. With multiple resources search, one can now see that the results are “By Resource” (1); this is indicated by the option being in black. Options in blue are options one may change to.
2. Click on the highlighted John Mark (2) to open The New Jerusalem Bible to Acts 12:25 near “John Mark”.
   

1. The New Jerusalem Bible opened to the occurrence of “John Mark” (1); when it open, moving red circles drew the user’s attention to the correct location.
2. Click on the parallel resources icon (2). It will open a selection box with one or more lists of parallel resources. The collection Bible: Catholic (Western) is a personal customization. One should see a default “All parallel resources” which will have the same behavior.
3. Select the New Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition (3).  Yes, I know I’ve been using the NRSV Ecumenical Version, but here it makes no difference.

This opens the NRSVCE to the same position. It reads “John, whose other name was Mark”. This explains why the original search on the NRSV produced no results. While one can write a convoluted search argument to use text terms to identify John Mark’s personal name as presented in the NRSV, there is no reason to do so … other than to prove that you can.

One can identify the correct references using the same logic that was used for the multiple Mary’s. First, take the person data type for John Mark i.e. <Person John Mark>. Second make a list of the two text names for John Mark separated by commas and put inside parentheses i.e. (John, Mark). Run the Search.

This finds 13 results in 9 pericopes. One also finds 13 results if one uses Factbook to obtain the information.

Parallel resources: Catholic Bibles

To create a parallel resources collection similar to Bible: Catholic (Western)

1. Select Tools on the Task bar.
2. Selection Collections.
3. In the collection pane: Select New (1)
4. Enter a collection name of your choice (2).
5. Check the Show in parallel resources option (3)
6. One can manually select all the Catholic Bibles for your collection, or you can write a collection rule to automatically select some titles. I used the collection rule “type:Bible AND language:English AND (author:"Catholic Biblical Association", "Confraternity of Christian Doctrine" OR title:"Catholic edition")” (4).
7. Drag and drop any titles from the Library panel into “+ Plus these resources:”.
8. Close the collection.