[B-Greek] Book Study Concordance of the Greek New Testament - greatprice
Mont Cessna
montc at earthlink.net
Fri Jul 30 18:54:06 EDT 2004
Eric,
>From what I read in your post I believe BibleWorks can do what this book
has assembled. I will forward your message to the BibleWorks staff for a
response and get back to you.
Mont Cessna, Sr.
Harrisburg, PA
montc at earthlink.net
> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-greek-
> bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Eric Weiss
> Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 11:40 AM
> To: b-greek
> Subject: [B-Greek] Book Study Concordance of the Greek New Testament -
> greatprice
>
> (Post corrected to fix ? appearing in place of "fi"
> and "fl")
>
> This comment on the Internet made me wonder if Bible
> software can do what this book has assembled:
>
> http://perso.wanadoo.es/rgomezp/weblog/archive/2004_02_15_archive
>
> Concordance compiled with the aid of... Bible
> software?
>
> Andreas Köstenberger and Raymond Bouchoc are the
> authors of the fairly recent The Book Study
> Concordance of the Greek New Testament (Broadman &
> Holman, 2003). This is what the blurb of the book
> says:
>
> > A New Bible Study Tool and a New Venue of Academic
> Research. Aided by breakthroughs in computer
> technology, The Book Study Concordance of the Greek
> New Testament has compiled data in a format that has
> never before been available to Bible students. The
> result is a collection of twenty-seven concordances
> listing every word used in the Greek New Testament in
> alphabetical order book by book. Also provided are
> word totals, most-frequently-used words, and words set
> in relation to the New Testament as a whole. This is
> an absolutely invaluable new tool for all serious
> Bible students and for the scholarly community.
>
> This mammoth work (viii/1528 pages) is based on the
> electronic version of NA27 developed by the Gramcord
> Institute. In the Preface, the authors state:
>
> > The Book Study Concordance of the Greek New
> Testament for the first time assembles concordances of
> each of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.
> The concordance is a fresh effort, though of course
> standing on the shoulders of those who have gone
> before us. The textual base of the present concordance
> is the electronic version of the 27th edition of the
> Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. The roots of
> the words were matched with their forms based on data
> developed and provided by the GRAMCORD Institute. In
> this regard we would like to acknowledge the
> foundational debt we owe to the previous work of the
> GRAMCORD Institute. The concordances themselves were
> generated by our own programs written to generate the
> concordance listings from the raw GRAMCORD data.
>
> Since Raymond Bouchoc is research scholar for the
> GRAMCORD Institute, they no doubt had access to the
> latest version of the tagged database, but I wonder
> what kind of program is "our own programs", and why
> did they not use any of the Bible software packages
> currently available. Could it be that none of them had
> the kind of statistical features and flexibility they
> needed? Here is what H. Van Dyke Parunak had to say
> about the issue of statistical analysis in his recent
> review Windows Software for Bible Study (pp. 481-482):
>
>
> > At first glance, it seems natural to plot frequency
> statistics per chapter, but this approach has several
> weaknesses. Chapters do not necessarily correspond to
> the natural discourse units of the text, either in
> extent (a natural unit may be wider or narrower than a
> chapter) or in their limits (which may not correspond
> with those of natural units). The same can be said of
> fixed width windows that are sometimes used in plots
> of this sort (for example, plotting occurrences in
> windows ten verses wide). This mismatch results in a
> profile that distorts the actual structure of the
> text. A much better approach is to let the window
> width change dynamically with the distribution, an
> algorithm that could be easily implemented by any of
> these packages. With this refinement, plots such as
> these become powerful tools for visualizing the
> structure of texts (...) but these features are not
> visible with plots at the chapter level. It would be
> even more useful if software packages provided an
> option to generate a file containing, not verse
> references, but the index number of each hit in a
> search, together with the number of words per verse
> and per chapter, so that users could directly
> manipulate distributional information in a package
> such as Excel or Mathematica. A further refinement
> would be to let the user define and annotate a number
> of fields with each hit to capture contextual features
> (e.g. direct vs. indirect or human vs. divine speech,
> putative literary source), and provide a simple
> flat-file database function (sorting and searching) to
> help the user perform supplementary studies.
>
> Well, if such an algorithm "could be easily
> implemented by any of these packages", I wonder why
> not a single one of them has already done so!
> Moreover, when I checked some of the stats given in
> the book against Accordance (which happens to include
> that particular database and has a pretty good
> statistical analysis feature) I soon came across a few
> discrepancies in the numbers. So, I would definitely
> like to know a little bit more about the tools and
> methodology followed by Köstenberger and Bouchoc.
> Their book is a welcome addition to the field of Greek
> reference tools, but I think some more information is
> in order if peer-review is to be pursued consistently.
>
>
> =====
> Eric S. Weiss
>
>
>
>
>
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