Recently I was writing something and wanted to cite where Jesus deals with a dispute among his disciples about which of them would be the greatest. I had the phrase "greatest in the kingdom" in my mind, so I did a search for greatest AND kingdom in the Gospels. This brought me to Matthew 18:1 and 18:4, a passage in which the disciples come to Jesus and ask him "Who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" That was close to what I was looking for, but not quite. I wanted the passage in which Jesus asks his disciples what they were quarreling about on the road. I could, of course, try to search for words like "quarrel" or "argue," but I couldn't remember the exact phrasing of the translation I was searching, so such searches would have been hit or miss and probably would have taken an unnecessary amount of time.
A quicker approach would be to take the passage I had already found and look for parallels to it in the other gospels. So I simply clicked in Matthew 18:1 to select it, then chose Gospels from the Parallels pop-up menu of the Resource palette (the icon with two side-by-side scrolls). This opened a Parallel window displaying the parallels to this passage in Mark and Luke. It was the passage in Mark that I ended up quoting from.
The moral of this story: Don't forget to use the Parallel databases to help you find parallel passages to the one you're studying. It can often be more convenient than trying to search by word.
# posted by David Lang @ 11:34 AM
