Radix Fidem Blog

Re: Naked Bible 173: Introducing the Book of Hebrews

Having covered Melchizedek in some depth, we are ready to address the New Testament source about him — the Letter to the Hebrews.

The letter is for us anonymous. His audience knew him, but we don’t know the identity of him or them. What we do know is that the author was male. There are several places where he chooses masculine forms when referring to himself. For example, in 11:32, the author refers to several OT heroes and says, “time would fail me to tell” of them. The Greek participle “to tell” always has gender, and here it is distinctly masculine.

On the one hand, the author is part of Paul’s circle (13:19-23). On the other hand, it’s not Paul because the Greek grammar is very polished and precise, which is not at all like Paul’s inventive wording and excessively long sentences. In essence, it’s one of the few books in the New Testament that isn’t precisely Koine Greek (vernacular), but approaches Classical Greek.

In addition, in 2:3-4 we learn that the author was not one of the Twelve, but cites their witness of Christ’s teachings. Furthermore, the author is very familiar with the priesthood and temple service, which are frankly foreign to Paul’s experience and writing. It’s the same high quality writing as Luke’s, but unlike Luke, is distinctly Jewish in orientation. Sources indicate that it’s on the same level as Philo’s writing, perhaps someone more like Apollos (Acts 18:24ff).

Finally, scholars note that Paul consistently opened his letters with some kind of greeting that announced his name. It was a recurring issue that people questioned Paul’s authority. Hebrews does nothing like that. The writer assumes his readers know who he is.

Other notes: The author quotes extensively and exclusively from the Septuagint. The opening of the letter is couched in terms of a Jewish insider. Yet, it’s not simply a broadcast to Jews in general. While it’s clear the author is aiming at a specific audience somewhere in the Mediterranean Basin, we are unable to pin down the exact location. All we know for sure is that they are under persecution for having embraced Christ. We get the sense they are a higher intellectual caliber than the common church bodies, perhaps a break-off group who had become a target of their fellow Jews somewhere, and had gone into hiding (5:12; 10:25). This lends credence to the idea of it being members of the priesthood.

Supporting the idea that they were a break-off group is 13:7, where the writer mentions they were not currently close to whoever their leaders had been in learning the gospel message. The whole chapter gives clues that this group was no longer in daily contact with the larger church body, as if there were some kind of tension there (vv. 1, 17-18, 24). The language indicates they had been part of a network of house churches. A part of the problem may have been the common expectation of that first generation of Christians that Jesus would return before they died. The whole letter refers to a loss of hope, apostasy, and a mounting contempt among outsiders for the name of Jesus.

There is a strong feeling that the author addresses pastorally an audience that is part of a much wider population that had come to Christ on the testimony of those who knew Him first-hand. In that sense, these are “second generation” believers. The audience never knew Christ the same way, so it’s a different kind of faith that holds them. The previously mentioned “leaders” were of that first generation who knew the Lord in the flesh.

But given the slow pace of travel and the sharing of ideas in those times, we are looking at a few decades after the Ascension. The earliest date is considered AD 60 for the composition of the letter. At the same time, it’s clearly before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. The Temple activity is referred to as present tense, current, ongoing. The mention of Timothy being in prison narrows it down to mid-60s AD, extrapolating from what we know of Paul’s timeline.

To some scholars, 10:32-34 reads like the events of the Edict of Claudius in AD 49, when Jewish Christians were driven out of Rome (Acts 18:2). Then again, the writer of Hebrews may be referring to the persecution of Nero in the early 60s AD.

This is one letter that clearly relies on the Septuagint. It is specific to the wording of the Septuagint instead of the Masoretic Text. But it shares with the rest of the New Testament the problem of how quoting and analyzing the text of the Old Testament comes up with something we don’t see at all today. The fancy term for that is sensus plenior — the “fuller sense” of the text. It’s a reference to a wide path leading up to the analysis of the passage. The Qumran Community in particular demonstrated this in their comments about Melchizedek.

They bring to that Old Testament mention of Melchizedek a wealth of associations that we don’t have. Thus, they come up with notions that deify the old priestly king of Salem, making of him far more than anything in the corpus of the OT actually says. Where we are today after the Cross is a far different world from the one inhabited by those who were still waiting for the Messiah. They did not feel compelled by our sense of grammar and history; they had very little contact with the intellectual processes of Hellenism. We tend to dismiss their analysis as wholly unwarranted at times, but Jesus and His disciples were part of those same traditions.

Keep in mind that the full story of the Messiah was kept hidden until after the Cross. It was scattered like puzzle pieces on the floor after the box was dumped off a table. The Jewish scholars were doing their best to make sense of the clues and saw far more in the Old Testament text than we do today. In their minds, the text pointed to a far wider territory, while we tend to think of language as wagons carrying a limited load. Within their traditions, seeing Christ in odd places was perfectly valid once they realized who He was.

Jesus Himself used the Scriptures that way. What the OT authors and prophets published meant more than what they themselves might have thought they meant to say. That was a key element in rabbinical scholarship. We aren’t comfortable with it, but the New Testament is loaded with that sort of “wild” exegesis. Heiser mentions the “grammatical-historical-exegetical method” and how common it is today among western minds. We must get used to the absence of that model from the Ancient Near Eastern scholarship.

Western minds are analytical, seeking to “define” — to put boundaries on ideas. The Hebrew people were carrying around a mass of notions about things in the Spirit Realm that is foreign territory to analytical minds. The problem is simply that we have too much background that fights the Spirit Realm. We are the problem. Even if we somehow discard those limits, we naturally get lost chasing all sorts of subjective nonsense that looks nothing like the Hebrew sense of order. The restraint on Hebrew minds was that deeply historic theological baggage that isn’t explained in Scripture.

Heiser calls it “layers of abstraction” but that’s just wrong. It should be layers of symbolism, not at all the same thing. They saw a purpose and mission that is alien to an analytical mind because truth is rooted in something no human actually comprehends. We cannot get our hands around it. All we can do is hope for contextual guidance from above. A spiritual and mystical orientation doesn’t demand all the answers, only enough to work with in the moment.

Today, we are loaded with an entirely different tradition. Our native baggage assumes that this world is all that exists. We have two thousand years of mostly trying to escape the mystical approach of the Hebrew people and bury it. Try to get a degree today that teaches you to think like a Hebrew. The definition of “scholarship” militates against it. Heiser comes close to acknowledging this as a major problem in biblical scholarship.

The Letter to the Hebrews includes a lot of this Hebraic outlook in how it uses the Old Testament.