Congratulations to the day 9 winner!

• Jason Gardner (eisdoxan.wordpress.com) - The Text Of The Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts module for BibleWorks

Many thanks for the kind folks at BibleWorks for sponsoring day 9 of Bible Geek Gone Wild’s 2nd Annual 12 Days Before Christmas.

(sung to the tune of 12 Days of Christmas)

On the 4th day before Christmas, Bible Geek Gone Wild gave to me another chance to win a BibleWorks module about Greek you see…

Welcome to day nine of Bible Geek Gone Wild’s 2nd Annual 12 Days Before Christmas. Today’s contest is sponsored by the kind folks at  BibleWorks.  The purpose of BibleWorks, LLC is to provide pastors, teachers, students, and missionaries with the tools they need to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). There are other companies that exist to do this as well, but BibleWorks comes to this task with some unique differences in approach and philosophy: We exist to serve the church, not to make a profit, and all of our business decisions are made with that in mind. Our goal is to provide a complete package containing the tools most essential for the task of interpreting the Scriptures in the original Greek and Hebrew, and to do it at a price that poor pastors and students can afford. To accomplish this task we routinely make marketing and sales decisions that many would consider to be bad business but which serve our primary goals. On the other hand, because everything that we do reflects on our real employer, the Lord Jesus Christ, it is our desire to provide a professionally executed and supported software package, while at the same time compensating employees with reasonable salaries that are competitive with the rest of the software industry. We try to treat both our customers and our employees as we would like to be treated ourselves. We are thankful that the Lord has blessed our efforts thus far and look to the future with expectations of further blessing, for as long as the Lord desires. You must be an existing BibleWorks 7 or BibleWorks 8 user to win this prize. There will be one winner in today’s contest.  The winner may choose between the two BibleWorks modules listed below:

Biblical Greek, by Maximilian Zerwick, translated by Joseph Smith. Copyright © 1990 by Biblical Institute Press.

Zerwick’s Biblical Greek was written to encourage ministers to consult the original Greek, providing numerous examples and particular attention to syntax. The discussion of Greek examples often brings to light nuances of Greek syntax not found in intermediate Greek syntax textbooks.

The Text Of The Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts, by Philip W. Comfort and David P. Barrett. Copyright © 2001 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Fully revised and updated from its original publication, The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts presents fresh transcriptions of the sixty-nine earliest Greek papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament—all produced before A.D. 325. Along with revised transcriptions, this volume includes:

• Introductions: Each manuscript is preceded by a concise introduction that provides such essential information as contents, date of writing, provenance, housing location, bibliography, physical features, and textual character. • Margin Notes: Significant differences between the text presented in this volume and the text presented in the editiones principes are noted in the margin. • Photographs: Nearly fifty photographs of different manuscripts provide the reader with a generous sampling of the various writing styles in this period.

No other resource brings together such an accessible and accurate collection of the text of the earliest New Testament Greek manuscripts.

Contest Details

You must be an existing BibleWorks 7 or BibleWorks 8 user to win this prize. The object of today’s contest will be to answer two questions related to BibleWorks. The answers to the questions can be found at the BibleWorks web site. The winner will be chosen from the entries with correct answers using the random number generator at random.org. Following the close of the contest, the winner will be contacted via e-mail. Good luck!

Terms and Conditions

* This contest is limited to residents of the 48 state continental United States.
* Contestants may submit one entry per contest per day.
* The winner or winners will be announced following the close of each contest.
* Prizes will be shipped within several days of the close of each contest.

This contest is now closed. The winner will be announced soon.

Having recently upgraded to Windows 7, I finally found the time this weekend to reinstall BibleWorks 8.  The install finished without event.  I did receive an error about a missing component the first time I checked for updates.  This only appeared for a few seconds and then the update screen launched.  After running all the updates and rebooting, BibleWorks has been running great.  So in the end, I’m going to label installing BibleWorks 8 on Windows 7 a success.  You can learn more about BibleWorks at www.bibleworks.com.

Getting into a discussion about BibleWorks versus LOGOS Bible Software is kind of like having a Mac versus PC discussion.  Most of us Bible Geeks took up residence in one of the two camps long ago and are staunch defenders of our Bible software of choice.  I have experience using BibleWorks 7 & 8 as well as LOGOS Bible Software 3.  BibleWorks 8 currently retails for $349 with a respectable number of resources and tools, including Greek & Hebrew.  LOGOS Bible Software’s Original Languages Library (version 4) is a comparable offering from LOGOS, which currently retails for $415.95.  I’m curious to hear why you might have chosen or would at a future time choose one Bible software package over the other.  What are the decision altering factors?  ( cost, features, resources, peer / mentor recommendations, library expandability, compatibility, etc.)  You can get a list of features and resources from the respective vendor’s sites:  BibleWorks, LOGOS Bible Software.

I wanted to take a minute and highlight a new feature in BibleWorks 8 called ERMIE:  External Resources Manager.  Here’s the description from the BibleWorks 8 brochure:

Over time, you’ve probably collected a number of useful books, references, and documents in vaious formats (PDF, HTML, word processing formats, etc.).  Add to that the myriad websites with all sorts of materials and courses your find useful in your studies.  With ERMIE, you can collect and organize these local and online resources into an easy to browse catalog.  ERMIE catalog files can be edited and shared with other users.

Out of the box, ERMIE comes with a large number of links to web-based materials already loaded.  I highly recommend taking a few minutes to browse through the preloaded material and then add your own.  I have a large number of web-based resources stored in favorites, text files, etc.  I’ll be adding them all to ERMIE, which will definitely make them easier to find when I need them.  In case you haven’t figured out how to launch ERMIE yet, here are a few screenshots to help you get started.

1.  Launch BibleWorks 8

2.  Click on the globe icon to start ERMIE.

ERMIE is organized like a traditional file tree.  The resource folders are on the left-hand side of the window.  Once you browse down to the a folder level containing resources, the resource links will show up in the right-hand side of the window.  If you double-click on a resource, it will load in a basic viewer/web browser at the bottom of the screen.

You can use the Add, Edit, and remove buttons to modify the folders and resources.  The More… button opens a submenu with options to create, open, import, and save ERMIE catalog files.  To learn more about this and other features in BibleWorks 8, be sure to visit www.bibleworks.com.

BibleWorks 8 has been sitting on my desk all day just begging to be installed.  As I near the end of the day, I finally found a few minutes to complete the installation.   BibleWorks 8 is available in either a CD or DVD version.  I am performing my installation with the CD version.  The Quick-Start Guide indicates that the CD version has six discs.  My package only had 5, so I’m assuming this is a misprint.  The workstation I’m using for the installation is a Dell Inspiron 6000 (1.60 GHZ, 1260 MB RAM, XP Home, SP3).  Chances are your installation will go slightly faster if your computer is newer and faster than my trusty 3.5 year old laptop.  You’ll want to have the Quick-Start Guide handy when you begin the installation as that’s where you’ll find your activation code.  Be sure you have sufficient free space on your hard drive if you plan to do a full install.  The full install takes approximately 5567 MB.  Once the installation is complete, you’ll be prompted to reboot your computer.  After the reboot you can go ahead and launch BibleWorks 8 from the desktop icon or the start menu.  You’ll be prompted to activate the product.  I chose internet activation, which went through in a matter of seconds.  Following activation, you’ll be prompted to register your product.  You can do this right away, at a later time, or never.  The “Getting Started” videos come up next.  This window will appear every time you launch BibleWorks 8.  If you uncheck the box for “Show this window on startup”, they will no longer appear.  Should you want to view them at a later time, just select “Getting Started” under the Help menu.  The final step to complete the installation is to run the BibleWorks Updater.  This can be found under Help–>BibleWorks on the Internet–>Check for updates.  Chances are you’ll want to click “Select All” & then click “Apply Selected Updates”  After the updates are downloaded, BibleWorks will restart.  Please note that if you go back to BibleWorks Updater and check for updates again, it may look like you didn’t download or install any of the updates.  “Show downloaded patches” is on by default.  You can turn that off under the Options menu in BibleWorks updater.  Once you make it this far, you’re all ready to start using BibleWorks 8.  Overall, my installation took approximately 4o minutes.  I suspect installing the DVD version to a slightly newer computer will take less time.  The installation was pretty much seamless.  The only issue I ran into was with the BibleWorks Updater.  As I noted above, it appeared that the updates weren’t being installed.  By default the downloaded patches are shown in the list of updates.  You can turn that off in the BibleWorks Updater options menu.

Now that the installation is done, it’s time for me to start “playing” with BibleWorks 8.  I’ll be putting out a more formal review in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, you can learn more about BibleWorks 8 at www.bibleworks.com.

Any day that the UPS truck stops by and the driver brings “gifts” to your door is definitely a good day.  We’ve had below zero temperatures and snow already this week and it’s only Tuesday.  After multiple 2 hour commutes, I definitely was looking for something to brighten up my Tuesday evening.  Fortunately, the UPS truck happened to wander through my neighborhood this morning and the driver delivered BibleWorks 8 to my door.  To honor this wondrous occasion, I decided to capture the event on my digital camera.  Here’s my first attempt at an official unboxing photo set.

After I complete the installation, I’ll post my thoughts about the install and will follow that up with a review after I’ve had a bit of time to explore BibleWorks 8.  If you’d like to learn more about BibleWorks 8, take a few minutes to visit their web site:  www.bibleworks.com.

According to the BibleWorks web site, version 8 started shipping on January 5th.  For those that preordered, your gratification will no longer have to be delayed.  This new version looks like the best BibleWorks yet.  Congratulations to the folks at BibleWorks for getting the new version out the door.  Release times are a stressfull time at any software company.  Hopefully they can a take a little breather after they get all those orders filled.