Pastorum Series Luke: Frustrated - Theme of "Mercy"

"God’s Mercy in the Gospels and Acts: In terms of percentage, the Gospel of Luke highlights the theme of God’s mercy more than any of the other Gospels and Acts." Miller, J. E. (2012). Study, Apply, Share: Luke (E. Ritzema, Ed.) (Lk 15:11–32). Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.

What is the basis of this conclusion? What Manuscript or Lemma is Mercy referring to? What verses are considered here? What word does the graph portray? Are these conclusions based on the same as the output of a word study on Mercy? Without any way of substantiating this claim, I wonder how useful this observation and graph is for personal study or preaching.

This was my first dip stick reading of the Pastorum series. If this is the indication of the overall quality, I am very much frustrated.

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Comments

Benjamin Varghese

Added to that, the bar graph or the axes does not show the counts; a legend is shown with all the bars and colours repeated when the labels could have been easily put on the giant sized bars. This is the dumbest bar graph I have seen in life.

TCBlack

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/443841#Comment_443841

Peter, I'm a numbers guy too. But the graphic has visual intent that we see more mercy in Luke (orange) than elsewhere.

Your source questions in the first post are valid. I'd like answers too. But the graphic doesn't bother me without numbers.

Benjamin Varghese

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/443911#Comment_443911

Hi TCBlack,

Thanks for your kind response. I agree with the visual intent, but as you said, having no pointers to substantiate the graphic to myself or others, it is virtually useless. I wish at least the English or Greek words considered were mentioned.

Regards,

Peter

Elliot Ritzema (Faithlife)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/443914#Comment_443914

I wish at least the English or Greek words considered were mentioned.

Peter, thanks for your comment. In this book, there are two kinds of slides, as is mentioned in the series preface:

Each graph explores the themes and words in a book and compares their use in other biblical books. The theme slides represent the total number of passages that deal with a theme (for example, “Service”) divided by the total number of passages in that book. From this you can glean the importance of a given theme to the book’s author, and you can compare its use in other books. The word study slides depict the use of a word throughout a book and compare its use in other books.

Jeffrey E. Miller, Study, Apply, Share: Luke, ed. Elliot Ritzema (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2012).

Word study slides are based on word occurrence, and theme slides are based on the preaching themes data that is new in Logos 5. The intent of the theme slides is to give an indication of the relative importance of a theme to a book's author.

Benjamin Varghese

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/443928#Comment_443928

Hi Elliot,

Very grateful that you responded, and now the Theme graph makes lot more sense! However:

It remains still unclear what 'Theme' refers to and how a reader can explore it further in the biblical book. Is it one word, more than one word, if yes what words? What verses do these words occur? What English translation are these words borrowed from?

While one can do word study by self and arrive at similar findings, correlating the graph with word study and elaborating the insight got from the graph using word study is the issue.

NB.Mick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/443932#Comment_443932

Peter,

When I first saw your post, I thought, this is something derived from a Logos search for the underlying words for "Mercy".

To spot check, I looked into a English-Greek resource (namely Vine's) to get the Strongs numers/lemmas behind and ran a bible search. I then simply counted the hits per book and let Excel build a fast diagram. It looks a bit like the one in your resource (rendering the result somewhat plausible).

@Elliot: I think Peter just would like a footnote to the chart, telling him which lemmas went into the analysis.