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That is a distinctly modern perspective, and as I suspected your interest in the designations of letters is to carve out exemptions that do not truly exist. Tsk tsk for you skipping to my second question and ignoring the first it was meant to augment.
Paul didn't recognize distinction in the church, there was one baptism, one Lord. The entire letter to the Romans is an indictment of dividing ourselves across gentile/Jewish lines.
I would think in the initial stages of exegesis it would be important to differentiate. But exegesis doesn't end there. It's a process moving from the original audience with all its contexts to the modern audience, discovering the differences and similarities between our world and theirs. And a Gentile world or context could be different from a Jewish context, as seen in Paul's earlier letters.
The principles don't differentiate. It could be another check to see if my principle is timeless. i.e. what applies to Jews should apply to Gentiles; if it's not both, it's not a timeless principle.
Historical context can be important, but typically the people making a deal about the audience are doing it to artifcially restrict them.
You seem to be speculating in areas that aren't often a major part of the discussion at hand. The idea behind these kind of questions are attempts to overcontextualize and declare large swaths of the Scriptures "other people's mail". Contextual analysis is, of course, important but the way that audience expectations in public letters was quite distinct from how addressing works in modern letters. And typically an excessive focus on original audiences stems from an anachronistic expectation of private concern.
Maybe I missed this?? How do you come to this conclusion?
Sure, you will always get people who do things for different reasons or even short circuiting the exegetical process, But I'm discussing how I would approach it. Yes, it becomes universal in its application but to deny that it was originally intended for a certain people in a certain context is ahistorical.
Past experience in discussions of this sort.
Understanding the original audiences isn't always all that helpful, especially as it's quite easy for us to think of these things in modern categories or with ill advised presuppositions. Developing an understanding of the history and circumstantial issues involved is of great interest exegetically, but unless there is reason to believe that the intention was restricted to a specific audience and not just that a particular audience happened to be the initial recipients questions about original audience might actually lead us astray. This is particularly true because in the ancient world the epistelory process tended to be public letters and the designees were honorific rather than true designations in the way such things function in letters today. Which can cause confusion where the honorific is used for literary/establishing purposes such as we see in James where the designation functions to identify it as being eschatological and is making a theological point.
I don't find gotquestions a particularly enlightening source, I am well aware there are some who claim that such a distinction exists but its unsustainable when we get into how the law actually functioned and trying to segment the law into the categories. They are theological inventions not reflected in the Bible itself.What is the difference between the ceremonial law, the moral law, and the judicial law in the Old Testament? | GotQuestions.org
What is the difference between the ceremonial law, the moral law, and the judicial law in the Old Testament? Is it only the ceremonial law that came to an end at the death of Christ?www.gotquestions.org
I don't see how discovering who the original audience is can lead one astray, especially if the end goal is not to remain in an ancient context.
It depends on whether such things are easily discoverable, or require us to read into the text. In the "letter" to the Hebrews, there's no greeting. If God wanted us to know who the original recipients were, that's a pretty big omission. So what do we base our interest in the original audience on? What do we use to investigate?
In particular letters, sure. But if there isn't a designee or the designee functions not to identify a particular group but to stand in for a theological declaration insistence on "original audience" misses the historical context rather than addresses it.
My example with James isn't about his original audience, but how the designation functions in his letter to not specify an audiene but instead present an eschatological vision. You're speaking to an entirely different concern, which is not reading the letters out of their historical context, but are missing key context in the discussion at hand. Questions about who the letter to the Hebrews was originally intended for doesn't really contribute to understanding the context of the letter since it doesn't respect that it is silent on the matter which is in itself an important piece of historical context.
