02/14/2021 – Day 273 – Hebrews : 1 -4 // Introduction – Central motif of the Book: “Let us draw near with a true heart in the full assurance of faith” (10: 19-23)
If I direct quote in this post , it will most likely be William Barclay’s “The Letter to the Hebrews” commenary in the pink color code books, that would be within our Sunday “Epistles” theme this year. So, Halley agrees with Barclay that Romans was written for the Gentiles, largely evangelized by Paul the writer, whereas, Hebrews was written for the Jew. The writer is not known but general agreement is that it was a Jew with a scholarly Greek diaspora background, as this book is generally considered the most eloquent Greek book in the Bible.
Here are the three conjectures as far as authors that Barclay puts forth:
- “Tertullian thought that Barnabas wrote it. Barnabas was a native of Cyprus; the people of Cyprus were famous for the excellence of the Greek they spoke;…. He was a Levite (Acts 4:36) and of all men in the New Tesatment he would have had the closes knowledge of the priestly and sacrificial system on which the whole thought of the letter is based. He is called the son of encouragemtn; the Greek word is Paraklesis; and Hebrews calls itself a word of Paraklesis. (13:22) He was one of the few men acceptable to both Jews and Greeks and at home in both worlds of thoughts. It might be that Barnabas wrote this letter, but if so it is strange that his name should vanish in connection with it.
- Luther was sure that Apollos was the author. Apollos, according to the New Testament mention of him, was a Jew, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and mighty in the scriptures (Acts 18: 24ff.; 1 Corinthians 1:12; 3: 4). The man who wrote this letter knew the scriptures; he was eloquent; and he thought and argued in the way that a cultured Alexandrian would. The man who wrote Hebrews was certainly a man like Apollos in thought and in background.
- The most romantic of all conjectures is that of Harnack, the great German scholar. The thought that maybe Aquilla and Priscilla wrote it between them. Aquilla was a teacher (Acts 18:26). Their house in Rome was a Church in itself. (Romans 16:5). Harnack thought that that is why the letter begins with no greetings and why the writer’s name has vanished — because the main author of Hebrews was a woman and a woman was not allowed to teach.
But when we come to the end of the conjecture, we are compelled to say as Origen said seventeen hundred years ago, that only God knows who wrote Hebrews. To us the author must remain a voice and nothing more; but we can be thankful to God for the work of the great nameless one who wrote with incomparable skill and beauty about the Jesus who is the way to reality and the way to God.
Ok , at the very beginning of “The Letter to the Hebrews” introduction, Barclay lays out a pithy breakdown of the four conceptions of religion, which is broken down by Apostle, thereby the Books of the New Testament.
Let’s start with this book and the unknown author, so I am out of order from Barclay:
- To some men religion is access to God. It is that which removes the barriers and opens the door to his living presence. That is what religion was to the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews. With that idea his mind was dominated. He found in Christ the one person who could take him into the very presence of God. The whole idea of religion is summed up in the great passage in Hebrews 10: 19-23. (Jimmy: Referenced in my title to this post. I will repeat the entire passage: “Therefore, brethren, having boldness to the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh. and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.”
- To some men it is inward fellowship with God. It is a union with Christ so close and so intimate that the Christian can be said to live in Christ and Christ live in him. That was Paul’s conception of religion. To him it was something which mystically united him with God.
- To some religion is what gives a man a standard for life and a power to reach that standard. On the whole that is is what religionwas to James and to Peter. It was something which showed them what life ought to be and which enabled them to attain it.
- To some men religion is the highest satisfaction of their minds. Their minds seek and seek until they find that they can rest in God. It was Plato who said that ‘the unexamined life is the life not worth living.’ There are some men who must understand or perish. On the whole that is what religion was to John. The first chapter of his gospel is one of the greatest attempts in the world to state religion in a way that really satisfies the mind.
The Jewish mindset: “To the Jew it was always dangerous to come too near to God. ‘Man, said God to Moses, ‘shall not see me and live.’ (Exodus 33:20). … The great day of Jewish worship was the Day of Atonement. That was the one day of all the year when the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies where the very presence of God was held to dwell. No man ever entered in except the High Priest, and he only on that day….
In view of this there entered into Jewish thought the idea of a covenant, God, in his grace and in a way that was quite unmerited , approach the nation of Israel and offered them a special relationship with himself. But this unique access to God was conditional on the observance of the people of the law that he gave to them. We can see this relationship being entered into and this law being accepted in the dramatic scence in Exodus 24: 3-8.
So then Israel had access to God, but only if she kept the law… The law was given; man sinned; the barrier was up; the sacrifice was made; and the sacrifice was designed to open the closed way to God. But the experience of life was that this was precisely what sacrifice could not do. It was proof of the ineffictiveness of the whole system that sacrifice had to go on and on and on. It was a losing and ineffective battle to remove the barrier that sin had erected between man and God.
What man needed was a perfect priest and a perfect sacrifice, someone who was such that he bring to God, a sacrifice once and for all opened the way of what Christ did. He is the perfect priest because he is at once perfectly man and perfectly God.
When was it written?
The only information we have comes from the letter itself. Clearly it is written for what we might call the second generation of Christians. (2:3)… From all that it is safe to say that the letter must have been written between two persecutions , in days when Christians were not actually persecuted, but were none the less unpopular with their fellow men. Now the first persecution was the time of Nero in the year A.D. 64; and the next was in the time of Domitian about A.D. 85. Somewhere between these dates this letter was written, mor likely nearer to Domitian. If we take the date as A.D. 80, we shall not be far wrong. (Jimmy note – That would be after the destruction and leveling of the temple, as well with Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. That is very significant, for without the temple, the Jewish religious foundation was gone. I think I side with Halley on this that it was written before the Destruction of Jerusalem. If that were not the case, the tone of the letter would be different. (See Revelations – say A.D.-95)
Oh, here is an important comment from Barclay I forgot: “Hebrews demands such a knowledge of the Old Testament that it must always have been a book written by a scholar for scholars. When we sum it all up, we can say that Hebrews is a letter written by a great teacher to a little group or college of Christians in Rome. He was their teacher ; at the moment separated from them and was afraid that they were drifting from the faith; and so he wrote this letter to them. It is not so much a letter as a talk. It does not begin like Paul’s letters do, although it ends with greetings as a letter does. The writer calls it ‘a word of exhortation.’
Soli Deo Gloria!