Logos 7: Here is a Sampling of its Awesomeness

It has been two weeks since Faithlife launched Logos version 7, and I'm just now getting around to blogging about it! But given my love for the software, you can bet that you'll be hearing more in the days to come.

The truth is that I don't get quite as excited as I used to, because I subscribe to Logos Now – so all of the shiny new features of Logos 7 have been released to me in six week cycles over the past 2 years. But it is still exciting, and I'm excited to talk to you about some of the new features in Logos 7. It is chalk full of awesomeness. Why do I say that?

Increased Access to Rich Data

Logos has spent many years adding rich data to the biblical text, but up until recently it hasn't always been that easy to access. This really started to change in Logos 6, and the trend continues in Logos 7. Faithlife has created so many awesome in-house resources that are available to users (like the Parallel Passages in the Pauline Letters that I helped create!). This is typified in the new interactive resources that are plentiful in Logos. Below shows off the new Bible Browser, as well as the Miracles in the Bible and the Speaking to God interactive resources. This video, by the way, is one of a number of new videos being added to my Logos Video Course that trains students on how to make full use of Logos, and I'm proud to say that it is still the best AND most affordable Logos training available.

Logos as a Learning Lab

Logos has always been a great place to turn for learning more about the Bible, but Logos 7 has really brought this to a whole new level. Two areas in particular highlight how Logos has really become a learning lab for users, guiding them into new knowledge and insight. The first spot is the new Courses feature. Here users will find a library of both video based courses (like Mobile Ed. courses) as well as text-based courses, where the student is guided through readings on a topic. While I know that Logos is pushing the mobile ed courses, I love the idea of a "guided reading" course, and I hope that Logos will continue to add to this section in the future. The second area which is focused specifically on teaching are some of the new interactive resources. Logos 6 introduced interactive resources like Who Killed Goliath and Counting the Ten Commandments. Logos 7 brings some great new teaching interactives like An Empty Tomb, Exploring Biblical Manuscripts, and Ancient Inscriptions.

Love for the Pastor and Scholar

Logos continues to keep both the pastor and the scholar in mind. The focus on media rich resources for pastors, as well as continuing to equip the Guides (passage guide and exegetical guide) with new features is great to see. I'm also excited to see the new Sermon Builder, and intend to write my next sermon with it so I can give a full review. and new datasets like the NT Manuscript Explorer, LXX Manuscript Explorer, Hebrew Bible Manuscript Explorer, and the Dead Sea Scrolls Interlinear Bible are awesome resources for scholars.

Have you had a chance to explore Logos 7? What's got you excited? Let me know in the comments.

Logos Freebies Every Biblical Scholar Should Know About

Logos is recognized as having the largest digital library for Biblical and Theological studies. Most people don't realize that Logos as a software is itself free - just go to the download page and download it.

Furthermore, creating a Logos account is free as well – again, just go to Logos.com and create an account. The log in credentials you create is what you use to sign in to the app.

While Logos is a business that is out to make money, they do provide some great free content as well. In fact, even a casual user can get some fairly good content to do some basic Bible study. What I want to do in the remainder of this post is highlight this free content, particularly the resources that would be of interest to academics.

First, you can see a full list of everything that costs $0 by going to this page. The list below will highlight the most important ones.

1. Faith life Study Bible. Not only is this one of the best study bibles out there, but it is much more than a study bible. It includes videos, infographics, tables, and timelines.

2. Lexham Bible Dictionary. This is destined, I think, to be the premiere (mid-sized articles) Bible dictionary. It is already huge, and continues to expand.

3. Lexham English Bible (with audio). The LEB is a fantastic translation. It is a more word for word translation, so it does not necessarily always read flowingly, but is great for study. You can also grab the free audio version of the ESV here.

4. SBL Edition of the Greek New Testament. This is a fully-tagged and fully searchable version of the Greek NT. It includes the apparatus.

5. Abridged BDB Hebrew Lexicon.

6. Perseus Classics Collection. The entire Perseus collection, over 1,000 volumes, tagged and searchable in Logos. This covers (I think) all of the ancient classical Greek and Latin literature. Because the collection is so big, the parsing is not always accurate. I'm not sure if Logos is working to correct this or not. Nonetheless, this is invaluable.

7. Duke Database of Documentary Papyri. Part of the larger Perseus collection, this contains 256 volumes of primary texts in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and other languages.

8. Codex Bezae. One of the most important uncial manuscripts in transcribed form. Dated to the 5th century.

9. Codex Sinaiticus. One of the most important manuscripts in transcribed form, dated to the 4th century.

10. Books.logos.com. A new beta program for Logos is a bit of a google books type project. They are digitizing some old works from particular libraries, and there certainly are some gems there. There are currently some limitations on these books – for instance it isn't easy to browse the books on the site right now. The biggest downside that I sincerely hope is remedied is that these are treated in Logos as media collections - in other words every page is treated as an image. This means they aren't searchable. As I said, I hope Logos runs OCR on these and makes them searchable in the future. Also, because these are image collections, it takes up more space than other resources. For primary literature, here are a few gems:

    • Migne's Patrologiae Graeca

    • The Oxyrhynchus papyri volumes

Go forth, download, and enjoy!

Utilizing Logos 6 for Academic Research 3: Canon Lists

See Video Below

Logos 6 has introduced a total of 24 brand new interactive media resources to their library. Much of this interactive media is cross-linked throughout the software (in the guides, factbook, etc.) but can also be accessed in both the tools menu as well as in the library, where they are categorized as "interactive."

There is some absolute gold in these new interactive media resources, and I'll highlight a few in upcoming blogposts. But there are a few new interactive media that for me as a biblical scholar stand out as offering a wealth of information that was previously more difficult to come by. The one that stands out for me as my favorite of the new interactive media is the new Canon Comparison resource.

The Canon Comparison resource catalogued:

• 6 church traditions;

• 21 documents from church history with canon lists; and

• 13 manuscripts

The result is an impressive interactive dataset for understanding the various lists. Each of these can be viewed on their own, with a brief summary of the document/manuscript/tradition if you are unfamiliar with it.

This is already a huge list. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of any other previously published resource that has offered this many canon lists in one place. Previous to this, I have always turned to the appendices of Lee McDonald's book The Biblical Canon, and even that (which is a must for anyone interested in canon studies) did not have this much info.

What supercharges this resource is the ability to compare any of these lists with one another. With a few simple clicks, one can compare the books of Codex Alexandrinus with Codex Sinaiticus, and throw in the canon list of the Muratorian fragment for good measure.

Kudos to Logos for this great new interactive media. And my sincere thanks to the hard work of Eli Evans and Martha J. Smith. You have done us a great service!

Check out the brief video below so you can see the Canon Comparison resource in action

Utilizing Logos 6 for Academic Research, Pt. 2: Supercharged Word Studies

In my previous post, I talked about the Ancient Literature connections that Logos 6 introduced – which allows its users to see the important connections with non-biblical literature. In this post I want to explore some new features of Logos 6 that greatly advance word studies in the primary languages.

If you are a Logos user, you already know about the built-in word study assistant called "Bible Word Study" (and if you don't, you really need to get some Logos training). The first 3 features discussed below are part of the Bible Word Study guide (or any customized guide you create).

 

Clause Participants

The Clause Participants section of the Bible Word study has two modes, Grammatical roles or Semantic roles. Using the Greek verb εὐαγγελίζω, the following images show you the results:

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I find this type of information especially useful for verbs, but the information is certainly applicable to other word types. Doing a search like this for εὐαγγελίζω, we see that Paul is the main "declarer of good news" in the NT. This type of information helps to widen the scope of our word studies, by seeing more of the information from their contexts, as well as related words and characters.

Sense Usage

A cool feature of the Bible Word Study has always been the translation wheel/pie chart, which allows you to see at a glance the various ways a word is translated in your English translation of choice. The new Senses section adds a new wheel/pie chart and builds upon Logos' unique work of the Bible Sense lexicon. In this chart, rather than seeing the words used to translate the word in question, the Senses chart shows you the various uses in terms of meaning (or sense usage). This is, ultimately, the more important question to ask when you are discussing the meaning of a word in its context – a word may be translated using the same English word but have different meaning from verse to verse.

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 Case Frames (Semantic Roles)

Building off of the incredible amount of work in semantics that Logos has done, the new Case Frames section of the Bible Word Study guide provides you with a break-down of semantic usage and relationships pertaining to your word. The example below shows that ἄρχω as a verb is primarily used in relation to events. Logos' presentation and easy to understand definition opens up the world of semantics to all Logos users.

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Morph Charts

Morph charts offers a visual presentation of any hits you receive for a lemma. This information has also been present in table form in the past in a morph search, but these morphology charts are much more user friendly and easier to see the full picture. The Morphology charts are part of the new Interactive Media resources in the Tools menu, and is also accessible in the top of the Bible Word Study.

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Utilizing Logos 6 for Academic Research, pt. 1: Ancient Literature Connections

With the advent of Logos 6 comes some great new features for both pastors and scholars. Over the next little while, I want to highlight some features that I feel really stand out for scholars in particular. The first is the new Ancient Literature Dataset, which is accessible in the passage guide (or any customized guide you create).

This dataset was created by Ken Penner (a former colleague at Acadia Divinity College) and Rick Brannan (whom I hope to be working with on a new Logos product soon!). I have so far been really loving this new feature of Logos 6. This is, in essence, an extensive cross-referencing system of non-biblical sources. But it goes above and beyond a simple list of potential cross-references, by also categorizing them.

To help introduce this great new dataset, I’ve asked Ken and Rick a few questions.

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1. First guys, thanks for this product! It is probably my favorite new feature of Logos 6. I want users to appreciate how much time a project like this must have taken. How long has this project been in the works?

[Rick]: You’re welcome, Danny! Wow, I really don’t know in actuality as far as exact time. It was in January 2013 or earlier when Sean Boisen asked me about the Cascadia Syntax Graphs of the Apostolic Fathers (which was and still is languishing on pre-pub), and why it was valuable. In thinking about that, I realized what people really want instead of a syntactic analysis like that is to be able to know when something in the Apostolic Fathers is relevant to the verse or passage they’re studying in the Bible. The connection between Isaiah 54 and 2 Clement 2 is a great example of this, and finding that sort of stuff is really only possible if you’re a search ninja that already knows the material.

Once the connection of relevant ancient reference for the Bible passage one is studying was made, the floodgates were opened. There is all sorts of ancient material related to the Bible that you might want to know about for a given verse or passage. So making a high-quality index of it seemed natural. The other thing that seemed natural was to classify the relationship between references as best as possible. It’s one thing to have a reference associated, it is another (very useful) thing to know what the relationship is between the Bible reference and the ancient reference. Once I got there, I wrote a lot of code to analyze all sorts of stuff, and was able to isolate some references. At that point, it was obvious there would need to be qualified human intervention to classify references (or rule them out altogether), and that is when I started talking with Ken because this stuff is right in his wheelhouse.

[Ken]: This one was pretty quick and intense. Rick pitched the idea to the company on April 15, 2013. I started on it in May; that was my summer and “research/publication” time for the rest of the year. We estimated:

• Dead Sea Scrolls Sectarian: approx. 230 hours
• Josephus: approx. 440 hours
• Philo: approx. 180 hours
• OT Pseudepigrapha: approx. 650 hours

2. The product page says this dataset catalogues “relevant passages from the Apostolic Fathers, Philo, the Talmud, Mishna, Judaic literature, Josephus, and more.” Can you fill out the “and more” part for us. And were there any major bodies of literature that were not included or perhaps will be in the future?

[Rick]: Apostolic Fathers is a small subset of the wider patristic literature. Another set of data included are “Church Fathers” which is more wide ranging. Think of the superset of ECF and Fathers of the Church (and, when we can do it, Ancient Christian Writers) as the basis for this stuff, minus the Apostolic Fathers stuff.

• New Testament Apocrypha
• Dead Sea Scrolls Sectarian Material
• “Judaic Literature” includes stuff like the Mekhilta and Pesikta as well.

Not included: I’ve considered some references with the Rule of St. Benedict and other early monastic rules, (relevant Logos product is the Benedictine Studies Collection), but there are so few users of that collection, we need to consider it a bit more before allocating resources to do it.

[Ken]: Nag Hammadi, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Context Of Scripture, Ugaritic material, and the Amarna letters as well.

3. Something that I think is very unique to what you’ve done is the additional categorization/tagging. To help users understand what these categories are, could you please provide us with a brief definition of the tagging that is used, as well as any other comments you might feel is necessary for users to understand these designations:

[Ken]

• citation – Introduced by a citation formula such as "it is written." Does it have a citation formula? It doesn’t matter whether or not the wording exactly matches.
• quotation – Intention to quote a phrase of this canonical passage. Is the wording intended to reproduce verbatim this specific scripture for at least three words?
• allusion – Intention to paraphrase the words of this canonical passage. Is the wording a paraphrase of at least a clause of this specific scripture? Does the relationship appear to be intentional?
• echo – Reader who has read both would be reminded of a similar scriptural passage. Does the verbal parallel evoke or recall this scripture (and possibly others) in a reader's mind, without apparent authorial intention to reproduce the exact words?
• topical – Similarity of subject matter. Is there a general referent in common with this scripture, without using the same word? Is its meaning similar? This is like Lexical, but for ideas rather than words.
• historical – Reference to the same specific event or situation, whether historical or fiction. Is there a specific referent in common with this scripture, whether or not the event is fictitious or in real history?
• lexical – The same or cognate word is used. Is there a word in common that is useful for lexical studies, but without evoking (even unintentionally) this particular scripture?
• phrase – Similarity of subject matter AND the same or cognate words are used. Is there a combination of words in common with this scripture, without being the same specific referent (which would be Echo or Historical)? This is like Lexical, but for phrases rather than words. Examples: verb & subject, verb & object, noun in genitive relation with noun.

[Rick]: These definitions are actually coded within the resource used by Logos, it just isn’t visible (yet). It may be available in some future version.

There are a huge number of references (over 180,000 at present, but that will increase with the next round of Church Fathers data I’m working on). Ken reviewed the references for Dead Sea Scrolls Sectarian Materials, Works of Philo, and the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. I reviewed the references for Apostolic Fathers, New Testament Apocrypha, and Works of Josephus. Other datasets were classified algorithmically. The material classed as ‘Judaica’ was fairly explicit in the way it interacted with the Biblical text, so most references were classed as quotations. The material for Nag Hammadi was similarly explicit, so a classification of allusion was preferred. Outside of a few possible examples, Ancient Near-Eastern Materials have no direct intertextual relationship when you are dealing with intertextuality in the direction we were (so, does the material use the scriptural material directly in some way) so those references were largely topical, and classified as such. The Church Fathers has been the hardest nut to crack because there are so many references in so much material. After considering and working the problem for awhile, I was able to make some guesses about contexts of occurrence and thus assign relationships of either topical, allusion, or quotation. These aren’t exact, but presently there are over 100,000 references in the Church Fathers material, so all we can really do is make educated guesses and hope we’re close. I think we’re close on these, but fully expect examples of miscategorization — probably a lot of stuff that are allusion or topical but should really be quotation.

4. Given these designations, please give some suggestions for how users can best utilize this feature and make good use of the tagging designations.

[Ken]

• Category ⇒ Use
• Citation ⇒ Canonical studies
• Quotation ⇒ Textual Criticism
• Allusion ⇒ Historical Interpretation
• Historical ⇒ History
• Echo ⇒ Theology
• Phrase ⇒ Theology
• Topical ⇒ Theology
• Lexical ⇒ Word studies

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Thanks very much Rick and Ken!

I want to end this post with  1 tip on how to utilize this new feature. If you are a Logos user, you know (or should know!) about the Passage Guide and how it works. But what you might not know is that you can create your own guide templates. For the ancient literature dataset, what I did was create a new template (Guides>Make a New Guide Template) called “xrefs” in this guide I added to sections: 1) Ancient Literature, and 2) Cross references. After that, I open in a side panel this new guide, and link it to my open bible panel in a link set. Now, whatever verse you are on, the panel will fill with the cross references from biblical and non-biblical sources. See my screenshot below and try it out for yourself!

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