"But God" Search in Old & New Testament

Jesse Hardy

I'm looking for a search that will return all instances of "But God" similar to the instance in Eph 2:4... I believe the Louw-Nida is what I want to search, but I'm not sure. I want to return every occurrence of "But" + references to God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit.

I think it will make an awesome study.

Any help here?

George Somsel

Jesse Hardy said:

I'm looking for a search that will return all instances of "But God" similar to the instance in Eph 2:4... I believe the Louw-Nida is what I want to search, but I'm not sure. I want to return every occurrence of "But" + references to God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit.

I think it will make an awesome study.

Any help here?

You can always do a bible search of your bibles for this, BUT you should realize that you are looking for an English rendering of a word which in Greek could be rendered in different ways.  It is not always rendered as an adversative but could be "now" or "and" or "for" (or several other ways).

Graham Criddle

Hi Jesse - and welcome to the forums.

Jesse Hardy said:

I'm looking for a search that will return all instances of "But God" similar to the instance in Eph 2:4... I believe the Louw-Nida is what I want to search, but I'm not sure. I want to return every occurrence of "But" + references to God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit.

As George says the simple approach to this is to do a Bible search for the phrases you are interested in - "But God", "But (Jesus, Christ)" etc (the second example will return results for either "Jesus" or "Christ"). Please see example below:

The point George makes is valid - let me expand a bit by the screenshot below:

The top two panels - NIV and ESV - show that different translations may change the ordering of words. So the search I suggested would find a match in the NIV for Ephesians 2:4 but not in the ESV.

If you want to allow for the re-ordering you could do a search "But WITHIN 20 WORDS God" but this could result in some false positives.

The bottom panel - NA27 - shows that the actual Greek words used are δὲ θεὸς - outlined in red in the screenshot. You could search for those which would get round the translation issues to which George refers

To do this, select both words, right-click on them and then "Search in this resource"

which gives

Using the "Add Versions" button you can include English translations in the search panel:

I have added in NIV and note that this now does show results for Ephesians 2:4 as it is working against the Greek as opposed to the translation.

Are you familiar with the original languages at all?

Does this help?

Graham 

Keep Smiling 4 Jesus :)

Jesse Hardy said:

I'm looking for a search that will return all instances of "But God" similar to the instance in Eph 2:4... I believe the Louw-Nida is what I want to search

Welcome [:D]

Morph Search using Conjunction Logical Contrastive (CLC) has two ways to specify CLC:

@CLC BEFORE 3 WORDS (lemma:θεός, lemma:Ἰησοῦς, lemma:κύριος, lemma:πνεῦμα, lemma:Χριστός)

<LogosMorphGr = CLC> BEFORE 3 WORDS (lemma:θεός, lemma:Ἰησοῦς, lemma:κύριος, lemma:πνεῦμα, lemma:Χριστός)

To find Louw-Nida range, right clicked on δὲ in Ephesians 2:4 then choose Louw-Nida followed by clicking on Lexicon:

 

Louw-Nida Contrast range is 89.124-89.138 that can be used in Morph Search:

<LN 89.124-138> BEFORE 3 WORDS (lemma:θεός, lemma:Ἰησοῦς, lemma:κύριος, lemma:πνεῦμα, lemma:Χριστός)

Noted Louw-Nida range search found more verses than CLC search.  Both searches include results where contrasting translation is different than "but".

Keep Smiling [:)]