I decided to try the passage guide in L4 and found some weird and some frustrating things.
I ran it on Ephesians 4:17-24 (the NIV is my preferred Bible).
The first oddity is that there is a title (pericope name from an unknown version?) "Put on the New Man." If I click the arrow I find that I can give this guide a Title and Description. I'm not sure why I'd want to do that, but it seems to be saved automatically under this name, whether I want it to or not (is there an option not to save?)
The commentary section is a bit underwhelming, or overwhelming, depending on whether or not I click the "more" button. But I don't have any commentaries prioritized right now, maybe that's the issue. I get some pretty 'weak' commentaries at the top (although I do like the IVP Bible Background Commentary, the others seem weak-IMHO, of course).
The Cross References section had some useful verses listed first and fully written out, followed by a list of verses which overflowed to a second page. Is it possible to simply display it all in the same page -- maybe with a drop down "more" link, like we see at the bottom of the Commentaries section? This section gives good information, BTW and the most relevant cross references were the ones that were fully written out. I found this part of the report helpful.
The Handout included so much irrelevant material (4 pages of it) that it seemed not worth the effort to fix it. It seems easier to create a similar document elsewhere. I have no idea how the calling of Levi, the faith of the Syrophonecian woman, the healing of Bartimaeus, paying taxes to Ceaser (etc.) got included in this handout. Does this thing have ADD, because it seems to have it's own way of making connections and getting distracted. (BTW, I have ADD. I know how this works.)
Media resources included some pictures of baptisms in the Jordan river. Huh?
But what really made me curious was the "Topics" section (see attached file). The first two entries (Adam and Baptism) aren't mentioned at all in this section, Adam isn't even in the book of Ephesians! I can see how 'creation' might get in there (cf v.24), but not "descent to the Underworld...First Epistle of Peter, Gift of Tongues...Spirit, Spiritual gifts, tradition."Some of the other topics make some sense. But the main topic of this section (even picked by L4) the "New Man" (and the converse: the "Old Man") aren't listed (except in Spanish "Hombre Nuevo" in large type).
It looks like the topics are picked from references that cite something in the current passage and then then article heading is listed here. The reason "Gift of Tongues" is in there (I just had to figure this one out), was that Anchor Bible Dictionary put in a reference to Eph 4:19 that should have been to Eph 5:19 (typo submitted). So the topic section works like a "cited by" section. My suspicion is that other off-topic topic references have to do with articles citing larger sections of Ephesians that merely include the section I'm studying. This makes the topics section much less helpful than it should be - in fact I probably won't use it again, unless this gets some attention.
When most of the default information in this guide seems irrelevant, it doesn't look very useful to me as designed. The only way this report is going to be helpful is if I spend some time putting together some collections (favorite commentaries, sermon collections, a Bible dictionary, etc.). Come to think of it, this is how I used it in version 3.
On the other hand, it seems to me that if L4 is supposed to work for new users "out of the box," something should probably be changed in this section. Minimally, new users should be encouraged to prioritize resources to get the most benefit out of this guide.
