“I believe some commentary sets are worth owning in full. Among them is the ESV Expository Commentary, which is now complete at 12 volumes that cover the whole Old Testament and New Testament. I think it is the best series for any Christian to own, whether it is to be used to study for sermons, to prepare Bible studies, or for personal devotion, growth, and learning.” - Challies
“Because the company distributes Christian content, uses a Greek word as its name, and its parent company is called Faithlife, many users assume they’re supporting a Christian initiative when they buy its resources. But there are four things you should know about Logos” - SellingJesus
“When I first began teaching others how to use Bible software in the early 2000s, I actually had a stock joke that Logos was building a sermon generator that would produce both exegesis and illustrations. It wasn’t a very funny joke then; now it’s not a joke at all. AI can do this.” - Mark Ward
by Randy Leedy
Let’s make sure at the outset that I’m clear about what I mean by “sentence diagramming.” Of the variety of forms of mapping out sentences visually, by “sentence diagramming,” I mean a method that at least roughly approximates the one developed by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg and published in the 1870s, hence known as the Reed-Kellogg method. Here is an example, from Matthew 1:21. The running text reads, τέξεται δὲ υἱόν, καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦν· αὐτὸς γὰρ σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν (And she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins).
Gaining understanding of something often requires that we take apart what we usually experience as a unit. We have to analyze. But we often fail to truly understand until we also do the reverse—until we take bits and pieces we usually experience separately and fit them together into a whole. We have to synthesize.
The combination of analysis and synthesis is nowhere more vital than in the study of Scripture. Sadly, synthesis is sorely neglected. What keeps sound preachers and teachers of the Bible out of the interpretive ditches is often not how well they do word studies and grammatical analysis, but how well they relate the passage at hand to the flow of the chapter, section, book, testament, and Bible as a whole.
Given the general neglect of synthetical Bible study, I was delighted to hear of Scott Bashoor’s recent publication of Visual Outline Charts of the New Testament (VOCNT). This study tool makes an important contribution to correcting the analysis-synthesis imbalance.
