Some people just seem to stick in your mind, don’t they? It might be a best friend when you were growing up. It might be a worst enemy at some job you had once. Whoever they are, little things keep reminding you of them, or you see their name on occasion, but consistently.When my wife and I decided to ask some people if they’d like to join us in our home every week to go deeper in our relationships, pray for one another, study the Bible and support one another in our spiritual growth and challenges, I realised we needed to invest in some exhaustive concordances.

An exhaustive concordance is a book that has every occurrence of every word that appears in the Bible so that a person can use it to investigate the development of a concept throughout the entire Bible. Scholars use them to conduct theology. The average person can benefit from using them to get a more balanced understanding of the significance of a word so that they don’t just end up yanking something out of context and falling into that old trap of reading a meaning into the Bible instead of letting the Bible speak for itself.

Anyway, so I went up on Amazon to see what was available these days, and I found something called The Strongest Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. Now, Strong’s concordance to the Bible is a long established and well-known concordance.

Nothing caught my eye about that except for the claim that this was the strongest version of it. Evidently, someone had expanded on the basic concordance and language dictionaries in the back by adding such things as maps, major social concerns of the Mosaic Covenant, Old Testament Sacrifices, the Hebrew Calendar, Hebrew feasts and holy days, weights, lengths, and measures of the Bible, kings of the Bible, prophecies of the messiah fulfilled in Jesus, parables of Jesus, miracles of Jesus, and a chronology of the Bible, along with Na|0xef|ve’s topical reference system.

Then I saw the name of the person who had done all this. It was John R. Kohlenberger III.

When I went to seminary our larger classes were held in an amphitheater styled room. The professor would stand down below, and rows of curved tables accommodated all the students who were arranged going up the side of the back wall. Way up in the back is where John would sit.

He was a slight man, thin, with dark, very curly hair. He was all business. He fit in with regard to dress; it was the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, and so often it was cold and raining, so all our clothing was long-sleeved shirts, coats, and casual pants.

John also had a short, but full beard, and when he spoke from that position, one sensed the air of authority. The first time I experienced it, I remember wondering, “Who the heck is THIS guy?!”

In our Bible classes what maintained my attention about him, though, was that the professor could be lecturing on and on for most of the hour, and then, at some point, he would stop, look all the way up to that back row, and say, “Would you have anything to add to that, John?” If he did, he would launch into the second part of the lecture, in which tid-bits of information and details came rolling out of his mouth with the air of relaxed and spontaneous conversation. One realised that since there was no way he could have prepared for that, the information just had to be there in his head from his own, independent study. The word “brilliant” came to mind. I have met many unusual people, but I have never met anyone just like John.

Every once in awhile I will see John’s name on some new book, and these books are always reference books. They are not the popular self-help variety, filled with all kinds of anecdotes and stories. They are “heavy”. They are scholarly. Now, you just know that when John was a boy, he must have been called such names as “nerd”.

So, he now constitutes another example of the person with unusual gifts and abilities, misunderstood and ridiculed in youth, who sticks to their interests and eventually leaves everyone else, including his antagonists, in the dust. At least, this is my imagination about my old classmate, whenever I see his name. I just smile and think what a wonderful thing it is that he exists.

Way to go, John.