Derek said:

Any way to search the words of Christ for sentences containing questionmarks?

thanks

Hmm, good question. You can't search for punctuation in Logos. So you might be able to get a good approximation by searching for all the question words: who, what, where, when, why, how, which. But that won't catch questions that are formed by reversing subject/verb: "Simon son of John, do you love me?"

I don't know Greek, but maybe there is some clue in Greek that points to a question which you could search for which someone else could help you with.

Barring that, it looks like a good project to read through all the red letter text looking for questions and marking them up with a particular highlighting style that you create for the purpose: Questions of Jesus. Someday, when/if we're able to export our highlighting to share with others, you'd be very popular!

You could use one of these books as a guide to help you should you decide to take this project on:

The Questions of Jesus, by John Dear ("offers a 2-3 page reflection [each] on 125 of Jesus' questions")

The Questions of Jesus: Meditations on the Red Letter Questions by Don Harris ("There are 151 questions, formulated in the mind of the Son of God, recorded in the Scriptures. This book explores them all.")

These are not available in Logos, unfortunately.

Mark Barnes said:

I suspect that's because only the surface text is tagged with WoC, not the underlying Greek text.

If that's the case, then why do they let us select WoC in a Morph search?

OK, my wildcard search for Words of Christ just finished. I did an Intersection Merge of the Passage List generated from that with the PL generated from Martha's suggested Morph search for the Greek Interrogative Particle, and came up with only 55 verses. It's missing, for example, all of Jesus' questions to Peter in John 21:15-17 "Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?" Etc.

I don't know Greek at all, but evidently there are questions that do not use that interrogative particle. I couldn't find anything in the morphology of the Greek text of those verses that would indicate a question, so you'd have to figure it out from context.

Remember, you can use a passage list to restrict a search range too.

Mark A. Smith said:

Another possibility for just this search would be for Logos to 'hard code' a list of the WOC Bible references (sort of like the passage list Dave supplied) which could then serve as a Bible reference option in all types of searches. This would be easy and a useful thing to do.

Actually, NO, NOT an easy thing to do ...

Words-of-Christ are not an original part of the manuscripts, so are up to the translation teams to decide. A simple check between ESV and NIV will show different verses includes or excluded.

E.G. John 3:16 in NIV "For God so loved the world ..." is shown in red, however, see the footnote after verse 21.

Possible solution: Make a WOC Passage List that includes the Superset of all main(trusted/prefered/fav.) versions as the base for any such searches. Then, on finding any "answers", consider the verses on their merit, using all tools to hand.

(Be nice if we had a working wildcard search that does not take an hour every time.)

Mark A. Smith said:

What this points up is the need for a fully functional search capability within Logos.

YES!!!

Please let us have access to the aw search engine. I don't care if the syntax is tricky or complex, but at least let those that are motived enough have at it!

(Someone would soon enough write up all kinds of cut-N-paste examples all over a wiki page or two, so those wanting or needing it, would work out the gory stuff. And of course, leave the nice simple front ends for users that just want to do more simple searching.)

Mark A. Smith said:

Not to argue, but it isn't hard to do at all. Your point is which version to base it on, not the difficulty of getting it done.

Correct!

Yes, not so hard in technical terms. Hard in terms of "which verses are in or out?". I should have made that clearer.

In Logos4, search for "*" with only Words-of-Christ enabled. Takes a VERY LONG time. Export/Save as a passage list. e.g. NIV as "WOC_NIV", ESV as "WOC_ESV", NASB95 as "WOC_NAS" etc, according to taste.

Then, using the Merge or Add Passage List features of 4.1 (Beta), slice and dice as required.

Actually, someone could do this for all their bibles that have WOC markup, make the master list, and paste it back here as a simple text file of the hits. Then, anyone else could do a simple import to their own PL, and not need the search portion.

If no one beats me to it, I might do it later today, if nothing else gets my attention, or seems more important at the time ...

Is such a list fair-useage, or a Copyright issue?

Mark A. Smith said:

JimT said:

Is such a list fair-useage, or a Copyright issue?

You would not be distributing the actual text through sharing the references. I can't see a problem with that.

I think the question is more whether the list of verses which the ESV translators consider to be WOC is their intellectual property (they've gone to the work to determine which verses they think he spoke), and ditto for each of the other translations that have red letter versions.

Philip Spitzer said:

You can make a search of all the Words of Christ with the following search.

That will only find the verses that include words beginning with a vowel. I'm sure Jesus must have spoken sentences with no words beginning with a vowel (in English translation, that is). Here's one, for example: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (that verse would get picked up by your search, though, because of the preceding Aramaic bit which is part of the same verse: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?")

Philip Spitzer said:

Yeah, I guess you need a star on both sides of the vowel.

Why include the list of vowels at all? Why not just search for * ? Yeah, it's slow (takes about an hour on my system). But is searching for all the words with vowels in them any faster? I haven't let it go long enough to determine whether it's faster.