L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #134 Compare Pericopes and its equivalents

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: ATTN: Sean and Kyle - pericope data set - Logos Forums

Pericope initially meant a portion of text that was reasonably studied as a unit; it became used primarily to describe the readings (lections) of a lectionary; it then became resurrected to referred to titled passages in a Bible. It is this novel use that is enshrined in the Compare Pericope tool. It is reasonable to report any missing data for Bibles that include titled pericopes as a data bug.

Notice that there is not concensus on where pericope boundaries fall. It is useful to study the "why" of differences between the pericope schemes:

1. Is one essentially a metapericope of the others (think beatitudes within Sermon on the Mount)?
2. Where does a change of topic occur?
3. Where does a change of setting occur?
4. Where does a change of characters occur?
5. Where does a change in literary form occur?
6. Where do these changes imply a pericope boundary may be found? Is it a weak or strong boundary?

There are other sources of pericopes with more historical depth or more exegetical depth:

• Unit by unit commentaries: think Anchor, Believers Church, Hermeneia, Sacra Pagina ... Note some of these define both an outline and pericopes
• Continuous readings: think Office of Readings (Catholic), Morning/Evening Prayer (Anglican)

However, they fail to have titles, a requirement of the Logos implementation.

The internal format we use is quite simple: an ordered list that pairs references (in our internal format, like `bible.1.1.1-1.1.25`) with a title. That could be CSV, JSON, or any number of other formats. We have to cover the complete corpus.

As for lectionaries, the historical primary source of pericopes, they not only are often untitled, fail to cover the complete corpus, and have overlapping pericopes.

For those who claim to not use pericopes, I'll believe that you do not use the word "pericope" or that you do not use the pericopes as defined in your preferred translation, but unless you choose to study the Bible only in entire books or 77 syllable units (or other deliberately idiosyncratic unit), you use pericopes in its base meaning - a unit of the text that it makes sense to study.