Historical Interpretations of Scripture

I was wondering if there is a way in Logos to look at how a verse or section of scripture was interpreted across a period of time. Kind of like how the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture works, but something that can search my library and return the list of writers commenting on a verse in chronological order.

Thanks!

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Rosie Perera

You can search your Library for all mentions of a particular verse or passage using the search syntax <John 3:16>. But there's no way to sort the results chronologically by publication date. That might be an interesting feature to request. Even if we had it though, there would always be cases where a book was quoting or mentioning a previous author who said such and such about this or that verse, and it would end up sorted under the publication date of the book the search hit was found in rather than the date the earlier author wrote about it. But it would be a start, anyway. But what you're asking for really requires the laborious work of a consortium of editors. It would be really hard to automate it.

MJ. Smith

I've created collections of commentaries and sermons divided into time blocks that are meaningful to me ... each has its own section of the passage guide

Simon’s Brother

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/555915#Comment_555915

What time blocks do you use MJ?

I've created collections of commentaries and sermons divided into time blocks that are meaningful to me ... each has its own section of the passage guide

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/555916#Comment_555916

Oriental church
Patristic to 700
Early to 1100
Eastern Church 1100-present
Scholastics 1100-1500
Reformation 1500-1600
Pietist 1700
Modern 1800
Contemporary 1900

Roughly to match Oliphant's History of Reading and Preaching ...

Donovan R. Palmer

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/555946#Comment_555946

Oliphant's books have been on my radar for a while... the reading pile just grows and grows with no end in sight! What you have done with your collections is fascinating. Very clever! Are you achieving this through tagging?

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/555956#Comment_555956

Yes tagging ... and tagging ...and tagging ....

Simon’s Brother

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/555946#Comment_555946

Thanks for sharing your approach.

Oriental church
Patristic to 700
Early to 1100
Eastern Church 1100-present
Scholastics 1100-1500
Reformation 1500-1600
Pietist 1700
Modern 1800
Contemporary 1900

Roughly to match Oliphant's History of Reading and Preaching ...

fgh

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/555904#Comment_555904

there's no way to sort the results chronologically by publication date. That might be an interesting feature to request.

There's a post by Bob somewhere where he expresses the intention to expand the 'publication date' metadata considerably, with original publication date and so on. I think the idea was precisely to allow us to use that metadata for searches that aren't currently possible. But someone else will have to look for the post.

Ron Corbett

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/556043#Comment_556043

Collections are the only way to do this now. And while, as Rosie says, this only gives us the Pub date and not the time frame of an author whose work is being referenced, it might possibly help us to place ideas and comments (about an earlier writer) within a specific period of time according to Pub date.

Here is a sample formula I picked up somewhere (apologies to the unnamed originator - either Mark Barnes (?) or John Fallahee (?)) :

pubdate:>1851 AND pubdate:<1899 ANDNOT (lang:greek OR latin)

This could be adapted for other time periods.

DMB

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/556201#Comment_556201

If you have a programming 'bent', there's various sites (of which I've conveniently forgotten) that have snippets of interpretation over time and the associated snippetee.

I imported them in out of htm into a small table indexed by snippetee and associated Bible text, added another table of snippetees and their associated dates. And then exported them into a PB, sorted by verse, date and snippetee. It's very useful to quickly glance to see who weighed in on the verse and when (especially if you're already familiar with their line of thinking).

Since I'm not sure where I got mine (!), I'm also careful to try not to violate personal use limitations.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/556201#Comment_556201

pubdate:>1851 AND pubdate:<1899 ANDNOT (lang:greek OR latin)

Correction: the lang clause of your rule will be misinterpreted since lang: only goes with greek; it binds tighter than the OR separator. If you really want it to do what you mean, you need to use parentheses to force the OR to be interpreted first by the parser (as in math where multiplication has higher precedence than addition)

pubdate:>1851 AND pubdate:<1899 ANDNOT (lang:(greek OR latin))

And a quick optimization, since comma is shorthand for OR:

pubdate:>1851 AND pubdate:<1899 ANDNOT (lang:(greek, latin))

Of course the way you had your rule initially will probably essentially work, because it will end up weeding out anything that has lang:greek and anything that has the word "latin" anywhere in the metadata (not only in the language field), which is probably a pretty good bet it isn't something you'd want included in your collection. But there might conceivably be a book in English about the "Latin Church Fathers" or something like that, which would be unintentionally excluded by your formulation of the rule.