Question on logic of assignment of addresee of prophecies

I am assuming that the reason for "audience of scripture" is not theological but linguistic/cultural. I would seem to me that the original addressee was the "audience of the prophet" ... which is what I would expect here. Or I would expect that the assignment would recognize that that we are quoting and hence a one-off where the audience is the audience of the Gospel author. Why the broader and somewhat misleading "audience of scripture"?

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Comments

Mark Barnes

I think this is complicated by the fact that this isn't a prophecy, but a quotation of a prophecy. The original addressee in Hosea 11:1 is "Israelites", which is surely correct. But who's the addressee here? It's not the Israelites. Indeed, no-one involved in the story is being addressed at all. So the editor seems to have decided that the addressee is us.

In my own opinion this text shouldn't be be given an addressee label at all — Matthew is just quoting the Old Testament. But if anyone is being addressed, it is the readers of the Scripture. (Although they're not being consciously addressed by the person indicated by the Speaker label, which raises the issue as to whether it's appropriate for the speaker label to refer to the original context but the addressee label to refer to the present context. I would say that's not appropriate.)

Another solutions for spoken intertextual quotations would be to have multiple speakers and multiple addressees (for original context and present context). But for written intertextual quotations I would argue that there's no contemporary speaker or addressee, and therefore if any addressee/speaker is added it should only be the original speaker/addressee.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/769831#Comment_769831

It seems to me that Faithlife didn't think this through. Speaker/Addressee are used for direct discourse not for quotations in general. Old Testament quotations are not direct discourse and thus should not be coded with either speaker or addressee.

Jimmy Parks

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/770095#Comment_770095

The purpose of the label "audience of scripture" was to fit the broad usage of OT quotation found in the NT. None of the authors are consistent in their introduction of quotations, or their attribution of them.

We can look at Matt 2:15 to see some of the problems that come up when trying to annotate the OT quotations.

The people who will read this quotation are not the same people who Hosea spoke to when he was prophesying. The audience is also not the people to whom the book was originally written. The people who will read this quotation are those who read Matthew's Gospel, but this does not make the audience of the speech the audience of the book of Matthew. The difference in audience is made clear by the introduction of the quotation. The author of Matthew introduces this reported speech as a quotation from an outside source (it has a speaker which is not the author of the book). Because this comes from a source outside of the discourse in which it is found, there is necessarily an outside audience. I understand that audience to be the group of people who continue to read the writings of the prophet Hosea. So, I could have tagged the audience of this quotation as something like "the readers of the book of Hosea," or something like that, but I wanted to create a label that would account for all of the OT quotations. The quotations of the OT are not uniformly introduced through the NT. In Matt. 2:15 the speaker is explicitly named as Hosea, but there are other places where "scripture" is the explicit speaker (Rom 4:3). Also, there are places where quotations from several OT sources are woven together as though they are from one. In order to account for all of these instances I broadened the label so that it could account for each usage while still retaining the linguistic accuracy needed in this type of data.

There was a lot of thought that went into the annotation of this data. We wanted it to be accurate and consistent so that it would be useful to our users. We also wanted the labeling to be consistent so that accurate searches could be run. The finer points of the methodology will be listed in the documentation for the data-set, which should be available soon.

I hope that this explanation is helpful. Please let me know if you have any further questions about the methodology used for this data.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/778634#Comment_778634

Thanks Jimmy, that gives me what I need to know.