its contents merited. In any case the Roman Church, where the first traces of the epistle occur, about A.D. 96 (1 Clement), had nothing to contribute to the question of authorship except the negative opinion that it was not by Paul (Euseb. Eccl. Hist. iii. 3): yet this central church was in constant connexion with provincial churches.
The earliest positive traditions belong to Alexandria and N.
Africa. The Alexandrine tradition can be traced back as far as a
teacher of Clement, presumably Pantaenus (Euseb. Eccl. Hist.
vi. 14), who sought to explain why Paul did not name himself as
usual at the head of the epistle. Clement himself, taking it for
granted that an epistle to Hebrews must have beeen written in
Hebrew, supposes that Luke translated it for the Greeks. Origen
implies that “the men of old” regarded it as Paul’s, and that
some churches at least in his own day shared this opinion. But
he feels that the language is un-Pauline, though the “admirable”
thoughts are not second to those of Paul’s unquestioned writings.
Thus he is led to the view that the ideas were orally set forth by
Paul, but that the language and composition were due to some one
giving from memory a sort of free interpretation of his teacher’s
mind. According to some this disciple was Clement of Rome;
others name Luke; but the truth, says Origen, is known to
God alone (Euseb. vi. 25, cf. iii. 38). Still from the time of
Origen the opinion that Paul wrote the epistle became prevalent
in the East. The earliest African tradition, on the other hand,
preserved by Tertullian[1] (De pudicitia, c. 20), but certainly not
invented by him, ascribed the epistle to Barnabas. Yet it was
perhaps, like those named by Origen, only an inference from the
epistle itself, as if a “word of exhortation” (xiii. 22) by the Son
of Exhortation (Acts iv. 36; see Barnabas). On the whole, then,
the earliest traditions in East and West alike agree in effect, viz.
that our epistle was not by Paul, but by one of his associates.
This is also the twofold result reached by modern scholarship with growing clearness. The vacillation of tradition and the dissimilarity of the epistle from those of Paul were brought out with great force by Erasmus. Luther (who suggests Apollos) and Calvin (who thinks of Luke or Clement) followed with the decisive argument that Paul, who lays such stress on the fact that his gospel was not taught him by man (Gal. i.), could not have written Heb. ii. 3. Yet the wave of reaction which soon overwhelmed the freer tendencies of the first reformers, brought back the old view until the revival of biblical criticism more than a century ago. Since then the current of opinion has set irrevocably against any form of Pauline authorship. Its type of thought is quite unique. The Jewish Law is viewed not as a code of ethics or “works of righteousness,” as by Paul, but as a system of religious rites (vii. 11) shadowing forth the way of access to God in worship, of which the Gospel reveals the archetypal realities (ix. 1, 11, 15, 23 f., x. 1 ff., 19 ff.). The Old and the New Covenants are related to one another as imperfect (earthly) and perfect (heavenly) forms of the same method of salvation, each with its own type of sacrifice and priesthood. Thus the conception of Christ as High Priest emerges, for the first time, as a central point in the author’s conception of Christianity. The Old Testament is cited after the Alexandrian version more exclusively than by Paul, even where the Hebrew is divergent. Nor is this accidental. There is every appearance that the author was a Hellenist who lacked knowledge of the Hebrew text, and derived his metaphysic and his allegorical method from the Alexandrian rather than the Palestinian schools. Yet the epistle has manifest Pauline affinities, and can hardly have originated beyond the Pauline circle, to which it is referred not only by the author’s friendship with Timothy (xiii. 23), but by many echoes of the Pauline theology and even, it seems, of passages in Paul’s epistles (see Holtzmann, Einleitung in das N. T., 1892, p. 298). These features early suggested Paul as the author of a book which stood in MSS. immediately after the epistles of that apostle, and contained nothing in its title to distinguish it from the preceding books with like headings, “To the Romans,” “To the Corinthians,” and the like. A similar history attaches to the so-called Second Epistle of Clement (see Clementine Literature).
Everything turns, then, on internal criticism of the epistle, working on the distinctive features already noticed, together with such personal allusions as it affords. As to its first readers, with whom the author stood in close relations (xiii. 19, 23, cf. vi. 10, x. 32-34), it used generally to be agreed that they were “Hebrews” or Christians of Jewish birth. But, for a generation or so, it has been denied that this can be inferred simply from the fact that the epistle approaches all Christian truth through Old Testament forms. This, it is said, was the common method of proof, since the Jewish scriptures were the Word of God to all Christians alike. Still it remains true that the exclusive use of the argument from Mosaism, as itself implying the Gospel of Jesus the Christ as final cause (τέλος), does favour the view that the readers were of Jewish origin. Further there is no allusion to the incorporation of “strangers and foreigners” (Eph. ii. 19) with the people of God. Yet the readers are not to be sought in Jerusalem (see e.g. ii. 3), nor anywhere in Judaea proper. The whole Hellenistic culture of the epistle (let alone its language), and the personal references in it, notably that to Timothy in xiii. 23, are against any such view: while the doubly emphatic “all” in xiii. 24 suggests that those addressed were but part of a community composed of both Jews and Gentiles. Caesarea, indeed, as a city of mixed population and lying just outside Judaea proper—a place, moreover, where Timothy might have become known during Paul’s two years’ detention there—would satisfy many conditions of the problem. Yet these very conditions are no more than might exist among intensely Jewish members of the Dispersion, like “the Jews of Asia” (cf. Sir W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches, 155 f.), whose zeal for the Temple and the Mosaic ritual customs led to Paul’s arrest in Jerusalem (Acts xix. 27 f., cf. 20 f.), in keeping both with his former experiences at their hands and with his forebodings resulting therefrom (xx. 19, 22-24). Our “Hebrews” had obviously high regard for the ordinances of Temple worship. But this was the case with the dispersed Jews generally, who kept in touch with the Temple, and its intercessory worship for all Israel, in every possible way; in token of this they sent with great care their annual contribution to its services, the Temple tribute. This bond was doubtless preserved by Christian Hellenists, and must have tended to continue their reliance on the Temple services for the forgiveness of their recurring “sins of ignorance”—subsequent to the great initial Messianic forgiveness coming with faith in Jesus. Accordingly many of them, while placing their hope for the future upon Messiah and His eagerly expected return in power, might seek assurance of present forgiveness of daily offences and cleansing of conscience in the old mediatorial system. In particular the annual Day of Atonement would be relied on, and that in proportion as the expected Parousia tarried, and the first enthusiasm of a faith that was largely eschatological died away, while ever-present temptation pressed the harder as disappointment and perplexity increased.
Such was the general situation of the readers of this epistle, men who rested partly on the Gospel and partly on Judaism. For lack of a true theory as to the relation between the two, they were now drifting away (ii. 1) from effective faith in the Gospel, as being mainly future in its application, while Judaism was a very present, concrete, and impressive system of religious aids—to which also their sacred scriptures gave constant witness. The points at which it chiefly touched them may be inferred from the author’s counter-argument, with its emphasis in the spiritual ineffectiveness of the whole Temple-system, its high-priesthood and its supreme sacrifice on the Day of Atonement. With passionate earnestness he sets over against these his constructive theory as to the efficacy, the heavenly yet unseen reality, of the definitive “purification of sins” (i. 3) and perfected access to God’s inmost presence, secured for Christians as such by Jesus the Son of God (x. 9-22), and traces their moral feebleness and slackened zeal to want of progressive insight
- ↑ Also in Codex Claromontanus, the Tractatus de libris (x.), Philastrius of Brescia (c. A.D. 380), and a prologue to the Catholic Epistles (Revue bénédictine, xxiii. 82 ff.). It is defended in a monograph by H. H. B. Ayles (Cambridge, 1899).
