Field Searching: Searching OT Quotes in the Greek NT

Did you know that you can limit your searches in the Greek New Testament to the portions that are considered by the editors to be quotations from the Old Testament? In the Logos editions of the NA27 and UBS4, we’ve added special tagging for all the text that appears in the print editions as quotations from the OT. In the NA27, these quotations are designated by italics, in UBS4 by bold.

Simply put the search term OTQuote: in front of the word or phrase you want to search for (e.g., OTQuote:κυριος). Libronix will limit the search to just the OT quotation text. A search in the NA27 for OTQuote:θεος, for example, yields 69 occurrences (compared to 1317 in the entire NT).

Another interesting thing you can do is find all of the OT quotations. Just run the search OTQuote:*. It yields 4662 hits in the NA27. Keep in mind that this is the number of Greek words, not the number of quotations. If we graph these results by number of hits per book, we get this.

So Acts, Matthew, Hebrews, and Romans are the top four. If we graph the results by percentage, we get these results.

The top four by percentage are Hebrews, 1 Peter, Romans, and Galatians.

By the way, there are two other fields that you can search within: DisputedPassage and LaterAddition (e.g., DisputedPassage:κυριος or LaterAddition:κυριος). Disputed passages are indicated by [single square brackets] (e.g., Gal 1:6). Portions of text that the editors consider to be later additions are wrapped in [[double square brackets]] (e.g., John 7:53-8:11).