Advanced Searching: Finding All the Commands of Jesus
I'm trying to find all the commands of Jesus. Morris Proctor wrote an article on it, however he says...
"Also in this search, we’ll find Greek verbs in the imperative mood, which is the mood of command. At times, grammatical constructions may carry an imperative force even though they’re not in the imperative mood. This search will not indentify [SIC] those instances."
I'd like to identify those instances. Best I can come up with, is I need to use the propositional outline tagging system to accomplish that. See my screenshot below. Is this going to be comprehensive? Is it going to omit any references?
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If you're a Logos Now subscriber, you should have access to the "Commands of the Bible" dataset, which would be the easiest approach:
Rick Brannan
Data Wrangler, Faithlife
My books in print0 -
Rick answered with an easier way to find commands. Let me analyze your search and help you understand some possible improvements to it. Compare your results to the results from this search:
{Speaker <Person Jesus>} INTERSECTS ({Section <PropositionalOutline = Command>}, {Section <PropositionalOutline = Mandate})
INTERSECTS instead of AND: The AND operator just looks for places where the left and right side show up in the same verse. The INTERSECTS operator looks for places where the left and the right side occur on the same word. This helps eliminate cases where Jesus says something in a verse, but isn't actually the one saying the command.
Using a comma instead of OR: Putting parentheses around a couple of terms and using commas between them instead of OR turns the items into a list. What this does is make it so that each of the terms in the list show up with the same highlighting instead of different highlighting. This happens because the list is treated as a single term, rather than each item in the OR clause acting as its own separate term.
Adding @V??M on the end: The way that you have this term in your search, makes it operate like (A OR
AND C. This suffers the same problem fixed above with INTERSECTS.So, the search above identifies the commands. If you want to further narrow this down to ones that don't use imperative mood, you would modify the search to something like:
({Speaker <Person Jesus>} INTERSECTS ({Section <PropositionalOutline = Command>}, {Section <PropositionalOutline = Mandate})) NOT INTERSECTS @V??M
This says to take all the commands found with the first search and show all the ones that don't also contain an imperative. You can also make this change to Rick's search if you want to make this identification as well.
I hope that helps.
Andrew Batishko | Logos software developer
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Compare your results to the results from this search:
{Speaker <Person Jesus>} INTERSECTS ({Section <PropositionalOutline = Command>}, {Section <PropositionalOutline = Mandate})
Propositional Outline intersection search can be expanded:
{Speaker <Person Jesus>} INTERSECTS ({Section <PropositionalOutline Command>}, {Section <PropositionalOutline Command (Neg.)>}, {Section <PropositionalOutline Mandate}, {Section <PropositionalOutline = Mandate (Neg.)>})
Rick answered with an easier way to find commands.
Thankful for Rick's label search that finds more verses than expanded Propositional Outline
{Label Command} INTERSECTS {Speaker <Person Jesus>}
Matthew 4:4 has Propositional Outline Quotation
Keep Smiling [:)]
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Thank you all, very helpful. Thanks Andrew for analyzing my search, helps me to understand the search criteria better.
John
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This is great stuff and exactly what I am looking for my course paper. I am compiling a list of all commands of Jesus to know what "teaching them to observe ALL" in Mt 28,20 exactly means.
I have figured that if I specify the command Type ~ Command in the Commands of the Bible dataset, I get nearly the same amount of hits as the query string suggested by Keep Smiling above.
Commands of the Bible dataset enhanced query -> 737 results in 483 verses
{Label Command WHERE Type ~ Command} INTERSECTS {Speaker <Person Jesus>}
Keep Smiling 4 Jesus query -> 739 results in 474 verses
{Speaker <Person Jesus>} INTERSECTS ({Section <PropositionalOutline Command>}, {Section <PropositionalOutline Command (Neg.)>}, {Section <PropositionalOutline Mandate}, {Section <PropositionalOutline = Mandate (Neg.)>})
Question:
Is there any possibility to eliminate repetitions/same commands so that I only get a list with the unique commands of Christ without their repetitions in parallel passages?
For example:
Mt 9:9 "Follow me." // Mk 2,14 "Follow me." // Lk 5,27 "Follow me." // Jn 21,19 "Follow me."
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
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Erwin said:
Is there any possibility to eliminate repetitions/same commands so that I only get a list with the unique commands of Christ without their repetitions in parallel passages?
Erwin, I don't think this is possible. Graham had one possible suggestion on a work around in this thread.
One of the reasons I think this will be particularly challenging is that commentators and theologians often disagree on what constitutes a parallel text. Who gets to define what those parallel texts are? If Logos could filter them out, then you're letting someone else decide what is parallel and what is not. A duplicate command may be parallel, or it may be from an entirely different event all together. I do think this is one of those situations where you are going to have to manually filter them.
If someone can correct me and there is a way to accomplish this, please let us know.
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Thanks for your quick reply, John!
I was assuming such a response. But I thought to give it a try anyway. There are always new developments and search techniques which I am not aware of. For instance, I could imagine to compare a similarity rate of two search results and if the percentage is let's say over 80% both references could get marked for a manual review. The function to compare text and calculate a difference percentage is already in Logos, see for example Text Comparison.
And yes, I would rely on someone's groundwork and judgment of what is parallel and what not if such a filtering method would be possible. But I am doing this already by using the Commands in the Bible dataset or the Reported Speech tagging of Logos.
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