Accordance and Me, Part 5: Using Accordance for Research

I use Accordance almost every day in my research and study of the New Testament and related literature. One of the great advantages of Accordance over other software packages on offer is their proven commitment to providing tagged texts of all relevant primary literature for the study of the Bible. Competing software packages simply follow Accordance’s lead. For example. recently Accordance has published tagged texts of the Apocryphal Gospels and the Christian Apologists (Ireaneus, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Theophylus of Antioch). These are not available with any other software program of which I'm aware.

I have used Accordance for research in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Aramaic Targums, the Mishnah, the Pseudepigrapha, Josephus, the Septuagint, the Apostolic Fathers, Ireneaus, and Justin Martyr. The Dead Sea Scrolls, Aramaic Targums, and the Mishnah tagged texts saved me countless hours of time I would have otherwise spent on painstakingly looking up the words in a Hebrew/Aramaic Lexicon. In addition, because most of this literature is unpointed, I have been able to work with it much more easily thanks to Accordance. Recently, my research has shifted into early Christian literature and I have used the tagged Greek texts of the AF, Ireneaus and Justin to great effect. While I infrequently conduct detailed grammatical research, Accordance provides the most user-friendly and intuitive search engines out there.

Without getting into a detailed discussion of using Accordance for research, I’ll be content to mention one very convenient feature. If you are working with a Greek text (or Hebrew or Aramaic for that matter) and you want to research a word in the various tools that you have (including Lexicons, Grammars, Commentaries, Bible Notes, etc.) you simply right click the mouse and select “Search All Tools”. A list of all the occurrences of that word in all your tools is generated. You simply select which the tool you want to look at and a new window appears with that tool.

Accordance and Me, Part 4: Accordance and Learning Greek

I tell my Greek students that Bible software is an indispensible crutch for pastoral ministry and academic research and teaching. The time one saves using Accordance significant and it will perhaps ensure that the exegetical skills gained in seminary will not be lost due to the pressures of ministry.

Yet, I do not espouse the method of teaching Greek, which some schools now offer, that simply teach students to the use software without an adequate foundation in Greek grammar and syntax. I do not advocate learning to use Accordance or any other program in place of the basic study of Greek grammar. This goes for online courses as well. While they can be useful especially for folks who do not have access to a seminary or college that teaches biblical languages, it is very difficult, although not impossible, to gain a sufficient proficiency outside of a classroom experience. Everyone, I realize, will not share this view; but even this semester I have a student auditing my class because they were unprepared for the exegesis course after successfully completing the Greek grammar course online. No matter what Rosetta Stone may say, learning languages is not easy no matter what bells and whistles may come with the product. At the end of the day, it comes down to just grinding it out in study.

Returning to my “crutch” analogy, I also tell them “one must break their leg, before a crutch is useful or necessary. This course will break your leg! After you complete it you’ll be ready to use a crutch".

Simply put, the long term effectiveness of Bible software for teaching and preaching is related to the extent of one’s basic grammatical knowledge.

Accordance and Me, Part 3: Accordance and other Premier Products

As I continue posting on the benefits of Accordance, I want to make perfectly clear the extent of what I am able to say about Accordance with respect to the other premier software products on the market. I have not had first-hand experience with BibleWorks and therefore I am not in a position to speak about Accordance’s advantages in comparison. I have mentioned that on more than one occasion colleagues and professors who have had experience using both have told me that Accordance is better. It is true that on the whole these folks have also been big Mac people. My perception is people who love Accordance also love Mac. While I am no PC basher, I do find Mac has advantages over the PC. I have had the opportunity to use both for extended periods of time (PC = 10yrs and Mac = 3yrs) and I think Mac is the way to go if one is contemplating the purchase of a new computer.

I am aware that Logos has made significant strides to gain a market share in the high-end Bible software arena. Logos historically had been not much more than an electronic library with little to no primary source modules. About five years or so ago, however, Logos rolled out a new product and it looks pretty good. I surveyed their website recently and it appears that Logos can provide scholars and pastors with solid resource for biblical studies. While I would not invest in it myself for a number of reasons, I think it would be an adequate program. Logos has many ministry-oriented modules (even magazines apparently) that Accordance and BibleWorks don’t and this may appeal to some. I am personally not interested in collecting a bunch of books and magazines in an electronic format. I am still “old school” enough that if I’m going to read something, I don’t want to read it on a screen. For me the benefits of Bible software are the research capabilities: the ability to have at one’s fingertips lexicons, commentaries, grammars, etc; as well as the ability to have vital linguistic information available with the move of a mouse or a click. As best I can tell Accordance does this better than any other product on the market.

Accordance and Me, Part 2: The Coming of the Emulator

I began a series of posts on Accordance last week and this week I want to add another installment in the series called “The Coming of the Emulator”.

As I began my Ph.D. work at Cambridge I studied alongside a Finnish guy named Marko. Marko and I got along well and we shared similar research interests. Marko was a computer programmer before leaving the workplace to pursue a degree in the New Testament. During his years at Tyndale House he was the resident computer expert. Marko made a significant impression on me with respect to the advantage of Accordance over BibleWorks through various conversations. While the details now of his opinions are not fuzzy, I remember that he strongly believed that for people not extremely computer savvy, Accordance was the better of the two. One comment I remember him making was that in his opinion BibleWorks was a more demanding and not as intuitive a program. This was to say nothing of the fact that at that time Accordance was leading the way in publishing tagged primary source material. such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

As I remember it, while Marko liked BibleWorks, and I think he was a PC man and used it, he thought on the whole Accordance was better. So, when it became apparent to me that Gramcord was not going to be my long-term solution, I began to think about a Mac. I decided to wait until I had the resources to purchase a Mac and until then I would just hold out. There was no reason to buy an inferior program, if one day I would have wished I had just waited for Accordance.

Then at an SBL I was introduced to the free Mac emulator that Tim Hegg developed. Tim showed me how easy it was to use and I was sold. The emulator opened up the Accordance world to me. On that day, I discovered that I could run Accordance on my PC. I could have Accordance without purchasing at Mac. So at that SBL, I purchased my first Accordance program and modules. I think that was 02 or 03. I would run Accordance on my PC for the next four years until the summer 2007 when I got a MacBook for the first time.

I’ll be honest and say that the emulator, while giving you the goods, is not an efficient tool. On the most basic and important tasks, such as cutting and pasting texts or printing, you would be required to do a number of additional tasks in order to perform the very simple one. For example, on of the most frustrating aspects of the emulator was the inability to directly cut and paste biblical texts into a document. I would have to copy them into a word document in the emulator (I got a free version of Word 5 for Mac) before saving the doc file onto a flash disk. Then after switching from the emulator, I would open the doc on the PC side. I could then copy the text and paste it into my document. This became frustrating after awhile, although I considered it a small inconvenience. One other issue was that it was not practical to use the emulator for teaching given that you would have to jump between the Mac side and the PC side during a presentation and this jumped did not always go smoothly. I Still, I was very thankful for the emulator and over the moon about the fact that I had Accordance.

When I purchased Accordance, Martin Abegg had recently finished the tagging of all the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls and it was the only Bible program to offer them at the time. The Scrolls were one of the first modules I purchased and used it to great effect whilst working on research in the Scrolls. I am indebted to Accordance for that module as it was foundational to that research. It should be said that I have felt this kind of indebtedness on many an occasion over the course of the years.

Accordance and Me, Part 1: DTS and Accordance

Not long ago Mike, my esteemed blog partner, began posting on the program Bibleworks. I am an Accordance user so I want to provide an alternative set of posts describing what I have come to believe over the course of over a decade and a half is the premier Bible program. I am asked by students what Bible program to purchase and while I tell them that Bibleworks is the best thing out there on the PC side, they should make the switch to Mac and get Accordance. Over the course of the next few weeks I want to tell the story of Accordance and Me. I begin with DTS and Accordance.

When I began seminary at Dallas Theological Seminary in the fall of 1993 I purchased my first home computer. I don’t remember much about it, perhaps it was a 386 or something, but it was a PC. During college I had gotten away with borrowing a friend's Brother word processor (it was just a big box). That first semester at DTS I had a Greek course with Dan Wallace where he introduced us to the latest and greatest Bible program called Gramcord. Desiring to have resources that would help me with biblical exegesis I purchased Gramcord. Back then the program came on about 10 disks that took probably an hour to load onto the commuter. I thought the program was the coolest thing and I hoped that it would be a great help to me as I progressed through seminary. At the time I had not yet envisaged pursuing Ph.D. I had purchased Gramcord simply because I was convinced that it would help me be a better youth pastor (OK so maybe the writing was on the wall, but I had yet to interpret it).

After several years of full-time ministry (about 7 in all), I came to realized that God was calling me into an academic ministry and at that point I reengaged the Bible program question. I had returned to DTS, after having been away for some time, in the summer of 1999. By that time the Bible programs had begun to come into their own with new products on the market. It was at this time that I was first introduced to Accordance, although it had been launched in 1994. I was a PC person, so it was not really an option at the time, but Bibleworks by that time had also come on the Market. Since I had already purchased Gramcord, I decided to contact them to see what was new and to acquire any upgrades. Gramcord began to discuss a new environment they were in the process of developing that they believed would rival both Accordance and Bibleworks. So rather than purchasing a new program I decided to wait it out.

Meanwhile, I was talking with my Profs about Bible programs and hands down they would each tell me that Accordance had no rival. One particular Prof, Harold Hoehner, could have been an Accordance Rep. Now if you knew Harold you will know that there were two topics he especially enjoyed discussing: Macs (and Accordance) and United Airlines. If you got him on either subject you would get an ear full. Other Profs had both a Mac and a PC and ran both Accordance and Bibleworks. I was consistently told that if you want the best Bible program get a Mac and get Accordance.

My next post will be "The Coming of the Emulator".

I'm now a MAC user

In seminary back in the early 2000's I was told that the best Bible program on the market was Accordance. Of course Accordance is a MAC based program and I was not a MAC user. However, at that time, Accordance began to suggest that one could run Accordance even if one had a PC by using a MAC emulator. Now I am not a computer geek--although a geek nonetheless--but I bought into this idea and began to invest in Accordance running it on my PC with an emulator. One side note, you don't have to know a whole lot to set up the emulator. There are excellent instructions and it is, by the way, FREE. Well, I have over the years invested a significant amount of money in modules. The emulator does have draw backs and I had begun to wish that I could have a MAC. Along the way, I purchased an used clam shell MAC and was running the Accordance on that as well as on my PC. This situation went of for 5 years until this summer. Through a serendipitous conversation with the NPU commuter people I discovered that while it is not the normal practice to give MACs to profs, they do make concessions for individuals with good reasons. For example the Art Department all uses MAC. Anyway, I made request and to my great joy it was granted and I am typing this post from my new MacBook. 

Strange how the littlest things can make one so happy--perhaps the better word is "sad". I told the commuter guys that my job satisfaction has just been significantly increased. Thanks NPU!

One more thing, I have no beef with other Bible programs, such as BibleWorks. There are many happy users. Yet one of my commuter savy friends who is familiar with both programs says that Accordance is much more user friendly. It seems now though that there is little difference in which types of modules are available, although Accordance seems to still be more on the cutting edge of making original texts available.