How to Read a Study

Every study on this site is built the same way, so every study can be checked the same way. This page explains the parts you will meet and what each one is for.

Read as far as you want

A study comes in three levels of short pages. The first gives the whole answer; each level below it shows more of the work.

1. The overview. The question, a short answer, and each part of the question answered briefly with the verses that settle it. It closes with what the study concludes, what it does not claim, and a reflection for the reader. If you stop here, you have the whole answer.
2. A page for each part of the question. The full answer to that part, and a list of narrower pages beneath it.
3. The narrow pages. Each answers one specific question. Where a passage is disputed, the page is titled with the objection a reader is likely to raise, and answers it. Each page gives the short answer, what the text shows, the usual objection, and the Hebrew or Greek words behind it.

Links at the top of each page take you back up a level, and links at the bottom take you on to the next page.

What the grades mean

Every answer in a study carries a grade that tells you how firmly the text establishes it. You will find it beside the study's title in the Studies list, beside the short answer on the overview, beside each of the overview's questions, and beside the answer on every page beneath.

The two "my position" grades tell you where the author lands, not what Scripture requires. They are never used for something graded Settled: if the text settles it, it is not merely a personal view. And where Scripture leaves a question open, the study says so rather than forcing an answer.

Each answer is graded on what it depends on. A point deeper in the study lowers the grade above it only if the answer above would fall without it. So if you find an Open point deeper in, it moves up only as far as the answers that depend on it. Where an answer would stand however that point is decided, the Open stays on its own page, and the answer above keeps its grade.

A study sometimes raises a question it does not set out to answer, and says so. Those questions carry no grade. However they are answered, the study's conclusion stands.

Each study's overview closes with What's Settled, which lists its conclusions under their grades.

Grounding lines

Each section of a study ends with a short line naming the passages it rests on. It answers the first question a careful reader should ask: what am I being asked to accept this on?

The line also says whether historical or cultural background was used. Background can help explain what a passage meant to its first readers, but it never proves a doctrine; only the text does. When a study does use background, the reading it supports is marked where it appears, and the background itself is gathered in one place, with each item marked for whether anything in the study leans on it. See Background helps explain; only the text proves.

The words behind it

Where a conclusion turns on a Hebrew or Greek word, that word is printed on the page in a table like this one:

• Word gives the original word, how to say it, its basic meaning, and its number in Strong's concordance, so you can look it up yourself.
• Where gives the verses where it matters.
• Form gives its grammatical form: for a verb, its stem, tense, person, and number.
• What it shows says what the word contributes to the conclusion.

In the running text, hover over or tap a transliterated word such as karathHebrewכָּרַתkarathto cut3772 · Qal perfect, third masculine singular to see the same details. The work is printed rather than just claimed, because a check no one can see cannot be checked.

A passage is read first in the New King James Version, then alongside the King James Version, and the original words are the check on that reading. See How the text is read.

Scripture on the page

• Quotations are copied from a verified text of the NKJV or KJV and checked against it, never typed from memory.
• The study is written from the NKJV, so the verses quoted in its sentences are always the NKJV.
• Hover over or tap a verse reference to read the verse without leaving the page. The NKJV / KJV button at the top of a study page switches these popups between the two versions, and your choice is remembered from page to page.
• Italic words inside a quotation are words the translators supplied to complete the sense in English; they have no matching word in the Hebrew or Greek. The study treats them as evidence about the translation, never as a ground for doctrine.

Textual notes

The narrow pages end with a textual note. The study checks the Greek Received Text against the Majority Text, and the written Hebrew against its traditional reading. If a difference could change a conclusion, the note explains both readings and what would follow from each. Otherwise it says that none does:

Textual note. No textual variants affect the conclusion.

A textual note never sets a verse aside. See Which manuscripts are followed.

Who writes these studies

Each study is drafted with the help of an AI model, strictly working under the rules on this site. All studies are comprehensively reviewed by a person: every conclusion is approved before the study is written up, and the finished study is read and approved again before it is published. The verses, word studies, and Grounding lines are printed so you don't have to take either one on trust.