Questions in the New Testament

Ed

Is there an easy way to do a search for all of the questions that are asked in the New Testament? Thanks!

Jerry M

Hi Ed,  You probably have a book in your library called All the Questions in the Bible by Hancock.  It is organized by books of the Bible.  I have yet to do it, but I suppose you could search the Louw Nida  numbers 69.11 - 69.16 which are markers for questions.

Mark Smith

There is no exact way to do this. If punctuation marks in the English versions were indexed it would be a no-brainer.

In the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament a number of parts of speech have been tagged as serving an interrogative function. There are interrogative adverbs, interrogative particles, and interrogative pronouns. There are also interrogative subordinate clauses.

Doing a search on all four of these produces a long list of verses most of which are questions. Not all of them are. (For example the interrogative adverb 'where' in English can be used to ask a question but also in other ways. Where was he born? He wondered where he was born.)

The syntactic search I came up with that produces the largest possible set of results is this:

The results look like this:

You'll have to sort through the results to weed out the ones that are not questions. I would do this by saving the results of the search as a Passage List and deleting the references that were not questions.

Since I do not do syntactic search often, someone with more experience may have a better suggestion, but this would be the direction I'd pursue.