Another form of Bible study involves name studies. You want to study the character or biography of a person in the Bible. Man was created in God's image and likeness, and the Bible gives an account of God's dealings with people. So making a study of someone's life, a person's lifestyle, actions and motivations is very meaningful and instructive. Not only to be inspired by someone's good qualities, but also to learn from their mistakes or failures. We will give an example and use the Study Bible as teaching material. We choose the person of Mary, the mother of Jesus, not the easiest example, but not the most difficult either.

Step 1
To begin, we need to identify the text places where she is mentioned. Through the "search" function and the search form 'Searching in word studies' we find that the name 'Mary' can be a rendering of two Greek names, namely 0363 Mary and 0364 Mariam. So we will have to use two word studies and two concordance lists to find out something about 'our' Mary. For both names may represent the Mary we are looking for. We now turn to the name studies numbered 0363 and 0364. In the concordance there are lowercase letters after the gear numbers, starting with "a" and rising to "g. This means that there are as many as seven different Marys in the NT. This fact is, of course, of great importance, because if we want to limit our study to the mother of Jesus, we should not study text places that are about another Mary. We briefly consult the name study and it turns out that Mary, the mother of Jesus has the letter "a. Now we can start to collect the text places where she appears using the a designations. In the concordance list, the letter (a b c etc) is immediately after the form number (1) (2) etc. For the sake of clarity, we only list the chapters here. First, the list of 0363 Mary: Matt. 1-2; Mark. 6; Luke 1-2; Acts 1. The list of name study 0364 Mariam gives: Matt. 1; 13; Luke 1-2; Acts 1. We read through the text places once in our own Bibles.

Step 2
The next step after reading the texts is to give a first impression and ask clarification questions. What immediately strikes us is that during Jesus' public appearance after his baptism, Mary is mentioned only once in the Gospel (Matt. 13:55/Marc. 6:3). A question mark arises here. Besides the texts about the birth, does Mary appear only once in the Gospels? We need to remember this and possibly find out further later.

Step 3
Then we are ready to make a chronological survey of Mary's life. We find these in the name study 0363 under '(a)'. On a first reading, we already get an immediate answer to the question just raised about Mary's appearance in the Gospel. It turns out that she is mentioned three more times, but not as Mary, but as the "mother of Jesus," namely at the wedding at Cana (John 2), when she visits Jesus once when He is preaching (Mark 3:31 vv.) and at His crucifixion (John 19:26-27). This completes the picture.
The chronological overview of Mary's life is given to you in the name study under '(a)' and we will not repeat it here. We are made aware of the fact that Mary was present at the crucifixion but not at the burial and resurrection of Jesus. She may have been defeated for days by the death of her son.

Step 4
Next we turn to identifying the character of Mary. For this, the Study Bible offers two sources. The first is the word study just read. Here we read that Mary generally supported Jesus' ministry. This is evident, for example, at the wedding at Cana (John 2), where she urges Jesus to help the embarrassed bride and groom. Her trust in Jesus is also evident in what she says to the servant ("Whatever he tells you, do that"). She seeks Jesus out when He is preaching (Mark 3:31 vv.). Mary was also present at the crucifixion of Jesus (John 19:26-27). And finally, after Jesus' resurrection, we see her back in the upper room, where she is in prayer with 120 others (Acts 1:14). So we can assume that she was also present on the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out. We conclude that Mary is characterized in the NT as a particularly faithful woman who was willing to place herself at the service of God's plan of salvation.

Step 5
If you want to go into even more detail about the character of Mary, you can make use of a second resource in the Study Bible, namely the explanations in the fourth column of the Bible volumes (volumes 2 through 10) to the passages mentioned in the name study. By including the explanations of said texts in column four of the Bible volumes in your study of the person of Mary, you can expand your paper as much as you like.