"Study" Is Not a False Friend in the KJV

As I’m going through Mark Ward’s list of “false friends” in the KJV, I’ve gotten a few requests for reviewing particular words on his list. One of those requests was for the word study in II Timothy 2:15. Ward claims that modern readers are incapable of reading this word as a reference to anything other than the acquisition of knowledge. The word used in this passage actually means “to earnestly endeavor” or “to pursue diligently.” The Greek word translated here literally means “to put feet to something.” It was a euphemism similar to our English phrase “put your back into it.” Thus, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God” could be written as “Earnestly endeavor to shew thyself approved unto God.”
 
There are many people who misunderstand this verse because they read it with the wrong definition of study in mind, and if Ward had merely pointed this out, I would have no disagreement with him on this verse. Ward’s claim, however, goes far beyond the idea that many people misread this verse. He claims that the correct definition of study in this verse is so obsolete that it has passed out of use entirely, and modern readers are hopelessly bound to read this verse as a command to acquire more knowledge. I’ll focus mostly on the word study in this article, but stick with me to the end for some hilarious observations of other claims Ward made in his videos.

So what exactly does Ward claim about the word study in II Timothy 2:15? He is more or less correct to point out that the word here means “be diligent” or “do your best,” but that’s about all he gets right in his videos that mention this word. In one video, he claimed that “back in 1611 the word study had a sense that has since dropped out of the language. It’s obsolete.” He continued in that vein by claiming that “because modern readers don’t know this obsolete sense of the word study, they will instead read it in the only available current sense.” In his debate with Dan Haifley, Ward said, “I use the NOW [News on the Web] corpus . . . You can search the word study. I’ve done this. And you look at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of uses and you will see that the word study never gets used to mean ‘be diligent.’” And in another video, Ward claimed:
 
What to my wondering eyes should appear in the Oxford English Dictionary but several senses of the word study which we don’t use anymore but which fit the Greek word extremely well. Senses under roman numeral one all have to do with striving or aiming. For example—‍‍to strive toward, to direct one’s efforts to, to set one’s mind on, devote oneself to—‍‍that fits the context of II Timothy 2:15 and the King James perfectly. Paul is telling Timothy to diligently do his best, to devote himself to, and set his mind on demonstrating himself to the Lord to be an approved workman, someone who doesn’t need to be ashamed before the Lord, a Bible teacher who rightly divides the word of truth. And sure enough, the OED marks this sense as obsolete. We have a false friend.
 
Ward’s claims about the word study can be divided into three separate but related claims.

1. The appropriate definition for study in II Timothy 2:15 is marked as obsolete by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
2. This definition has dropped out of the language and is no longer available to readers.
3. The word study is never used with this definition in the NOW corpus.

 
Study in the Oxford English Dictionary
 
Ward’s first claim is blatantly false, and anyone who watches his video carefully should be able to spot the lie. Shortly after Ward gave his pretentious performance of definitions magically appearing before his wondering eyes, he acknowledged another definition for study that he found in the OED. Ward noted that “there’s another now rare sense of study that has a slightly different nuance as reported by the OED, one of aiming more so than of striving.”
 
This is where the lie begins, and it starts out very subtle. Notice the screen shot of the dictionary entry in Ward’s video.

Ward circled the word aim to draw his viewer’s attention to it, but look at what he does not want their attention on. The word immediately after aim (with the first letter covered up by Ward’s circle) is the word endeavour. Why would Ward focus on the word aim but ignore the word endeavour? Earlier in the video, Ward had mentioned that the modern translations all use a form of either “be diligent” or “do your best” instead of study in II Timothy 2:15, and look what appears before our wondering eyes when we search for the word diligent in Ward’s beloved Oxford English Dictionary:

So the word diligent means “persevering in endeavour,” and what word did Ward not mention when he drew attention to the word aim? Why sure enough, it was the word endeavour. Now, I would have dismissed this as just another example of Ward’s inability to use a dictionary if it weren’t for what he said next. Ward immediately dismissed the second entry for study as irrelevant to the discussion by saying that the Greek word in II Timothy 2:15 “means be diligent, set your mind, and that’s the sense of study that the King James translators intended.”
 
Ward added a phrase to the meaning of the Greek word. His definition now includes the phrase “set your mind.” This added phrase is not found in any of the Greek lexicons, nor did Ward mention it at any time prior to this point in the video. There is only one possible reason for the inclusion of this phrase in the definition of the Greek word. Ward included this phrase to associate the Greek word with the obsolete definition of study found in the OED.
 
Here are the first two definitions for study in the OED:

And here is the full BDAG lexical entry for σπουδάζω, the Greek word translated as study in this verse:

You can see that the phrase set one’s mind on is only found in the first definition of study which is marked obsolete. This phrase is absent from the second definition, but the second definition doesn’t align with Ward’s argument. He needed a way to convince his viewers that the first definition is the one the KJV translators intended, so he took part of the first definition of study and blended it with the lexical entry for σπουδάζω to deceive his viewers into associating the two with each other. The truth of the matter is that the second definition from the OED is the correct definition for the word study in this passage, and this definition is not marked as either obsolete or archaic.
 
A Side Note on Dictionary Usage
 
As a side note, let me point out briefly that Ward is misleading his viewers in the way that he uses the dictionary. Ward literally gushes with praise for the OED. In nearly every video in his “false friends” series, he lauds this dictionary as the single most authoritative dictionary ever written, and he treats it as an infallible source of knowledge and wisdom. I’m sure that part of this is nothing more than an attempt to impress his followers and intimidate his opponents by claiming to have access to a better source than they do (which is silly since the subscription price for the OED is only $10 per month), but the foundational premise of Ward’s “false friends” argument seems to rests solely on the labels assigned to words in the OED.
 
There is just one major problem with Ward’s reliance on dictionary labels—‍the labels were never intended to be authoritative. They are not the authoritative and practically inspired utterances that Ward seems to believe them to be. They are just editorial suggestions intended to guide the reader in his quest for understanding what an author may have meant when he used a particular word. The preface of the third edition of the OED warns against the temptation to use it in the manner that Ward does.
 
Another myth about the Dictionary, and about dictionaries in general, is that they provide a comprehensive analysis of each word treated. Again, this cannot be the case in a finite text. But more important, philosophically, is that any dictionary attempts to provide information in a manner which is accessible to the reader. In order to do this, it is customary to subdivide polysemous words by their meanings and by the grammatical and syntactic forms in which they are found. However, any extensive examination of the documentary evidence for a language soon uncovers examples of usage which straddle two or more of the stated meanings of a word, often idiosyncratically and in ways which it is not practical for the dictionary to illustrate. The reader should be aware of this incongruity and should regard the Dictionary as a convenient guide to the history and meaning of the words of the English language, rather than as a comprehensive and exhaustive listing of every possible nuance. [emphasis mine]
 
This warning is especially apropos to our current discussion of the word study. The entries for this word illuminate a critical flaw in Ward’s methodology. In another part of the preface, the editors noted that the dictionary is trending toward an increase in the number of words marked obsolete, with “52% more words and meanings” receiving this designation in the third edition than in the second edition. Against the background of this trend, it is significant to note that the second definition of study that we looked at earlier in this article is labeled “now rare” in the third edition of the OED, but it was labeled “archaic” in the second edition. The labels for this meaning changed in the opposite direction of the trend.
 
Here is the entry for this meaning of study from the second edition:

When we compare this to the current entry from the third edition shown above, we can see that the label changed from “arch.” to “Now rare.” The third edition also includes an additional source—a 1959 quotation from T. S. Eliot. When the editors studied the literature to write the third edition, they found that the second edition editors had overlooked uses of the word study that were current in their day. The “archaic” label should never have been applied to this meaning of the word, and the current editors have corrected that mistake. Personally, I think that the “rare” label is also misapplied, but I’m content for now to note the significance of this change. The current editors have shown a predisposition toward labeling words more archaic or obsolete in this edition than in the previous edition, but they were forced to go in the opposite direction with this definition of the word study.
 
All of this becomes even more significant when we note that Ward thinks that the label should have changed in the opposite direction. He thinks that it should have changed from “archaic” to “obsolete,” and he practically said as much in an article that he wrote for Oxford University Press earlier this year. Referring to the second definition of study which the third edition changed from “archaic” to “rare,” Ward wrote, “The OED carefully describes an equivalent sense of ‘study’ that was operative in 1611 but is obsolete—or, so the OED editors judge, ‘rare’—today.” Ward is so oblivious to the change in labeling for this sense of study that he blithely equates “rare” with “obsolete” as if there is no difference between them and no reason at all for the editors to have chosen one label over the other.
 
By the way, the printed copy of the dictionary that Ward pretended to consult in his video is the 1989 second edition, and the online edition on his screen was the third edition. He literally had the change in labeling staring him in the face while he recorded the video.
 
Study in Modern Literature
 
Ward claimed that the definition for study in II Timothy 2:15 has dropped out of the language entirely and is no longer available to readers. This claim once again reveals that Ward has no expertise in English literature. There are still a substantial number of authors who use study to mean “be diligent” or “earnestly endeavor.”
 
It is interesting to note that Ward did not say anything about when this definition of study supposedly passed out of use. He only said that it had done so, leaving it up to his viewers to speculate about how many ages may have passed since authors stopped using the word this way. Even if Ward were correct, this momentous event could not have been that far in the past. R. A. Torrey used study in this sense in 1924 when he remarked in his book The Power of Prayer that “if we always study to do the things that are pleasing in His sight, He will always study to do the things that please us, and therefore will grant our requests.” And as I already pointed out, the OED lists an example from T. S. Eliot’s writings in 1959. In the absence of any explanation from Ward, I suppose that we could try searching through Google Books to come up with an answer for ourselves.
 
Maybe Brian Nance was the last author to use study in this sense in his 2001 book Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician. Nance wrote, “Take care not to be alone, and while you study to show your skill in the art by contending single-handed and to make your own immediate decisions . . .” Could Nance have been the last author to use study this way?
 
Maybe it was Lana McNeil who wrote, “Study to show yourself worthy of the things you desire” in her 2009 book Positive Forces in Healing: Healing from Within.
 
Or maybe the last person to use study this way was Alex Soto. Soto wrote in his 2012 book The Will of God that “we should study to be holy.”
 
Then again, maybe it was Franklin Watson, whose 2013 book Let Me Finish, People included a double use of study in the sense of “earnestly endeavor.” Watson wrote, “Let us study to see that our lives are an honor to the cause we have espoused; that we abstain from even the appearance of evil; that we are circumspect in all our conversation, in our conduct—‍watching our thoughts, our lips, and our lives. Let us study to be diligent in every duty, performing it with a ready mind and with joy and gladness of heart.” Surely, a passage this long must have been the world’s final clutch at using this definition for study.
 
Unfortunately for Ward’s argument, those pesky authors continued to use study in this sense even after Watson. Hugh Malafry must have read Watson’s book and decided to claim the title for himself when he used study in his 2017 book Blue Shaman: Master of Hallows. Malafry followed Watson’s example and used study with this definition twice in the same paragraph. He wrote, “You must study to make him jealous, even if you care not in the least for another . . . and so cultivate him that he studies constantly to be enrolled in the service of woman’s praise.” But Malafry’s noble ambition for being the last author in the history of the world to use study to mean “earnestly endeavor” was doomed to fail. Authors just kept using study this way no matter who tried to claim the title of being the last.
 
I do have a bit of good news, however. I think that I may actually have found the missing piece that Ward needs to complete his argument. I have found the last use of study as a word that means “earnestly endeavor.” In his book Cultivating Christlikeness: Loving as Jesus Loved, Paul W. Chilcote penned these words: “We must study to be humble, meek, gentle, long-suffering, contented, resigned to the will of God, dead to the world and truly alive to God.” And that’s it, folks! We can finally put a date on when the meaning of “earnestly endeavor” for the word study passed entirely out of the English language. It happened on March 26, 2024, when Paul Chilcote published the book that will one day be famous for ending an era that lasted more than 1700 years. I am absolutely certain that no author will ever use this word in this sense ever again, and Mark Ward can now take his victory lap.
 
Study in the NOW Corpus
 
Ward is fond of bragging about his inability to find his “false friends” in the NOW Corpus. The NOW Corpus is a searchable database of news articles gathered from the internet. NOW stands for News on the Web. It’s a database that anyone can access and search for free, and Ward apparently thinks that it is a good barometer of modern word usage. I would argue that it is just one of several tools that should be used together to measure word usage, but it is a very useful tool. Unfortunately, Ward does not appear to be very proficient in its use.
 
In his debate with Haifley, Ward said, “I use the NOW Corpus . . . You can search the word study. I’ve done this. And you look at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of uses, and you will see that the word study never gets used to mean ‘be diligent.’” I want to help Ward overcome this inability. I really do. It hurts to see a brother struggling so hard and still failing. Regrettably, he didn’t share any details about how he attempted to search the NOW Corpus, and I can’t show him any specific changes that he needs to make to improve his results. However, I did run several searches through the Corpus myself. Maybe Ward can learn from his mistakes by analyzing my results.  For instance, searching for the participle form studied provides a much smaller pool of results while still retaining the characteristics of the base verb form.
 
Here are twelve examples I found in the NOW Corpus where studied is used to mean “diligent”:
 
“It felt like a studied effort to persuade nervous Lamborghini prospects that the reputation its cars had - scary, hairy-chested and a bit like hard work - no longer applied.”
https://www.pistonheads.com/news/ph-germancars/aventador-svj-roadster-vs-huracan-evo-spyder/41567
 
“Going back to 2000, there was a studied effort to make sure that the lawyers’ public statements had the utmost credibility.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-trump-loyalists-are-driving-his-campaign-e2-80-99s-legal-efforts-to-challenge-ballots/ar-BB1aJBR5
 
“The banal familiarity of the seasons as they wash over us no longer require studied effort to estrange them.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/on-the-margins-of-anthrop_b_8693612
 
“. . . where people build three-storey basements in a studied effort to be non-ostentatious.”
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2012/11/24/mallick_lessons_from_oslo.html
 
“It is the ideas, creative provocations, and the artist’s own studied resistance to interpretation throughout his interviews and writings which ensure that audiences remain intrigued.”
http://theconversation.com/andy-warhol-still-surprises-30-years-after-his-death-73328
 
“House Speaker Emanuel ‘Chris’ Welch and Senate President Don Harmon have kept a studied silence on the matter.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-column-illinois-pensions-how-to-move-forward-part-five-greising-20230917-hw5flaqeozdtlcztq5qaey7q6q-story.html
 
“The royal family led by King Charles III and Harry’s elder brother Prince William have maintained a studied silence as painful details from the book and a round of pre-publication TV interviews have piled up.”
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/prince-harrys-spare-displayed-next-to-how-to-kill-your-family-novel-in-bookshop-3681178#pfrom=home-ndtv_lateststories
 
“He has maintained a studied silence on Trump’s indictment, and by all accounts intends to continue it.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/trump-hunter-biden-indictment-plea-deal/674543/
 
“Two days later, Mr. Putin went quiet on the issue in public—‍a studied silence that kept the West guessing at his intentions.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine-us.html
 
“What you are seeing is across the board, elected Republicans not giving the benefit of the doubt to the FBI, not observing the studied silence that you would normally do when evidence is being gathered.”
https://www.foxnews.com/media/fbi-trump-raid-msnbc-figures-balk-calling-mar-a-lago-search-colleagues-term
 
“Additionally, the studied silence that has often been the option of choice for many companies becomes harder to maintain when increased transparency and searchable databases make it simple to see whether a firm has taken a stand on a salient political issue.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_us-businesses-increasingly-taking-stands-political-issues/6204811.html
 
“The news that a Marine recruit had died on Parris Island was met with studied silence.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/magazine/how-the-death-of-a-muslim-recruit-revealed-a-culture-of-brutality-in-the-marines.html
 
Study in Google Books
 
And as a bonus before we get to the humorous part of the article, here are fifteen additional examples from Google Books:
 
“There seemed to be a near-studied attempt to keep my back to the puck.”
George Plimpton, Inside the Ropes: Sportswriters Get Their Game On, 2008
 
“Term . . . to describe the practice of buying expensive goods and services that appear simple or inexpensive, i.e., the studied attempt to appear less affluent while in fact sacrificing nothing.”
Jon Winokur, Encyclopedia Neurotica, 2005
 
“. . . in a studied attempt to do without the world and those who inhabit it.”
Giuseppe Rossi, Paola Carbone, The Law and Comedy, 2023
 
“The first is his studied effort to translate culture . . . The second is his studied effort to translate language and to attach power to his act of translation.”
Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, 2011
 
“It seemed she had been as freed from the monotony of our life together by my departure as I had been, or else there was a studied effort on her part to suggest that was so.”
Paula Fox, The God of Nightmares, 1990
 
“Discussion of these issues in Southern Baptist sources, however, suggested a studied effort to mute the furor.”
Andrew Michael Manis, Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars, 2002
 
“So she made a studied effort of her own to pretend it did not affect her in the slightest.”
Amanda Scott, The Duke’s Daughters, 2013
 
“She stared at him hard, then laboriously sat up on her couch, fixed me with a Gorgon scowl, and walked slowly out of the room in a studied attempt at nonchalance.”
Michael Curtis Ford, The Last King: Rome’s Greatest Enemy, 2004
 
“His studied attempt to charm her had been thoroughly resistible.”
Frank Corsaro, Kunma, 2003
 
“Ralph’s attitude changed from reflection to studied alertness.”
Pete Merrill, Ralph: Conversations with a Bear, 2003
 
“His attire and studied alertness gave him the look of a secret service agent working the rope line.”
Angus MacDonald, At Fault, 2000
 
“If a studied alertness to such prompts was one aspect of an interpretive practice that was habitual for many readers of the Bible . . .”
J. Christopher Warner, The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton, 2005
 
“They were clothed like nobility, the folds of their robes causing each to seem a statue of some ancestral figure, the studied blankness of their eyes like carven marble.”
Walter Wangerin, Jr., Paul, 2001
 
“A studied blankness—‍a sense of peace, she would no doubt say—‍brought a neutrality to her expression.”
Carla Neggers, The Angel, 2008
 
“Never marry a Persian. They forever study to try your patience.”
Thomas Hoover, The Moghul, 1983
 
A Bit of Fun at Mark Ward’s Expense
 
Now it’s time for the humor I promised at the beginning of the article. Let’s begin with a statement from one of Ward’s videos about study. Ward boasted that he “owns over ten thousand books in the Logos Bible software, all of them dedicated to Bible study.” Yes, he actually bragged about the number of ebooks he has available to him on his computer. I guess if we want to get into a bragging contest, I can boast that I have a single DVD from Project Gutenberg with more than 29,000 books on it, and if Ward tops that, I’ll get the Ebook Foundation’s entire 60,000 book download. Then I can tell people how smart I am because I own 60,000 books. Seriously, what kind of person goes around bragging about how many ebooks he owns?
 
If Ward really wants to brag about the books he owns, maybe he could tell us how many physical books are in his house. Before I donated most of my collection to my church for other people to enjoy, I had a 1,200 square foot room filled with more than 5,000 books. I would love to hear how many physical books Ward has owned in his lifetime. Or even better yet, I’d love to hear how many books Ward has actually read. I mentioned in a previous article that I’m particularly qualified to speak on English literature because I devoted ten years to reading an average of three books per day. By the end of that time, I had read more than 10,000 books. I’ve actually read more books than Ward is bragging about owning. How many books has he read?
 
I also laughed when I heard Ward threaten, “I am purposely not getting into transitive versus intransitive uses of the word study, though I could. I warn you I could.” I was driving down the interstate when I first heard this part of Ward’s video, and I was sorely tempted to pick up my phone and play this section of the recording back again a few times over. Ward actually believes that his knowledge of the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs is a threat to those who disagree with him. No, he was not trying some sort of weird joke. Ward actually believes that his opponents are so stupid that they are intimidated by his knowledge of transitive and intransitive verbs.
 
I know that this is what Ward actually believes because he tried to use the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs as a counterargument to my article on the word halt. I provided more than seventy modern-day examples of halt being used in the same sense that it was used in the KJV, and Ward’s primary objection to those examples was that none of them were intransitive. I explained to Ward that participles drawn from intransitive verbs are still intransitive, and he eventually admitted that he was wrong about modern uses of the word halt. This just goes to show that when Ward hilariously threatened to use “transitive versus intransitive” as a weapon against his opponents, he truly believed that we would be intimidated by that possibility.
 
I want to thank Mark Ward for all of the various material that he has put out into the world regarding the word study in the KJV. It’s all filled with errors, but at least it’s good for a laugh. I have thoroughly enjoyed the humor in things like Ward completely missing which sense of the word aim the OED used in its definition of study. (Maybe Ward’s next project could be denouncing all the “false friends” in the OED.) And I got a huge kick out of seeing him quote the OED’s entry for the word archaic to explain what they meant by that label instead of quoting their own explanation of the label from their website. There were at least six or seven times in the course of this study that I had to stop because I was laughing so hard, and I want to thank Mark Ward for injecting so much humor into his material, even if he did so completely inadvertently.