Persians in the early church?!
Running a topic guide on "ministry in the early church" I wouldn't expect any results earlier than the book of Acts since I've been taught all my life that that was when the church was formed. However, thanks to the topic guide I've discovered that the church was already active in the days of queen Esther!
Comments
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I ran this topic guide but I'm not sure what you see in these verses in Esther that indicate "early church ministry."
Please point out your understanding.
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David Betts said:
I ran this topic guide but I'm not sure what you see in these verses in Esther that indicate "early church ministry."
I think his point was that the verses don't have anything to do with early church ministry and should not be included in the results.
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David Betts said:
I'm not sure what you see in these verses in Esther that indicate "early church ministry."
That's exactly my point! There is absolutely nothing related to "Ministry in the Early Church" in these verses and should NOT be included in this topic guide or the resulting in-line filter as you see it in my screenshot of the ESV.
I'm making the point that the topic guide (and not only this one) is far from accurate at this point, and should be re-examined.
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Acts 2:9 mentions the Medes were present on Pentecost, so maybe some of them became Christians and ministered to or were ministered to by the early church. If we just equate the Medes with the Medo-Persian empire with the Persians, then everything is good! [:P] (sarcasm, just in case anyone wasn't sure)
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Reuben Helmuth said:
That's exactly my point! There is absolutely nothing related to "Ministry in the Early Church" in these verses and should NOT be included in this topic guide or the resulting in-line filter as you see it in my screenshot of the ESV.
Except for sections that are hand-curated, one has to live with this unless you can find a tweak to the routine that collects the verses that can make it even more accurate. Many of the "bizarre" choices can be tracked to a particular resource. Finding it can often give you the convoluted way the passage came to be listed.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Interesting topic.. a little more digging brought me to Acts 7:38 ..the church in the wilderness.. those called out of Egypt..
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The references in Related Verses / See Also are gathered automatically from dictionaries and similar reference resources that are aligned to this concept. So while the articles and Key Verses are manually curated, the See Also references are not: there are far too many of them (as in, millions).
We present them in canonical order, rather than frequency order, to make it easy for users to navigate what is typically a long list of verses. However, that obscures the fact that some of these verses are much more relevant to the concept than others (as measured by the number of articles that reference them in this context). And since OT passages come first, they stick out for this concept.
For this concept, the most frequently referenced verse is 1 Cor 15:5, followed by 1 Tim 4:14 and Titus 1:5: I think you'll agree these verses are relevant to the concept.
In the case of Esther 2:2, it's mentioned here in the Anchor Bible Dictionary article on Ministry in the Early Church:
Even the personal form of diakonos (“servant, slave, waiter”) is to be found only in Esther (1:10; 2:2; 6:1–5), in an additional verse in Prov 10:4 (not found in the MT), and once in the very late book of 4 Maccabees (9:17).
Clearly this reference isn't "about" the concept, and this is a second important caveat about using this list of references: though a resource mentions a reference in a particular topical context, we don't know why that verse is mentioned. Here it's part of a tangential discussion of an important Greek word used to talk about ministers in the early Church.
We've discussed the possibility of adding controls to Topic Guide to show this block of references with frequency information, which would both make the most important verses stand out, and diminish the visible of these outliers.
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Thanks for your reply Sean!
Sean Boisen said:So while the articles and Key Verses are manually curated, the See Also references are not: there are far too many of them (as in, millions).
I realize that manual curation is not feasible for this amount of data IF that curation needs to happen within the Faithlife payroll! This is just one of many areas that could majorly benefit from crowdsourced tagging/curation/labeling/linking.
Sean Boisen said:We've discussed the possibility of adding controls to Topic Guide to show this block of references with frequency information, which would both make the most important verses stand out, and diminish the visible of these outliers.
This would be a good solution in the interim! 😉
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