Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/638

Rh G04 HEBREWS immediately after the recognized epistles of that apostle, and which contained nothing in its title to distinguish it from the preceding books with similar headings, &quot; To the Romans,&quot; &quot;To the Corinthians,&quot; and the like. 1 A similar history, as Zahn has pointed out, attaches to the so-called second epistle of Clement to the Corinthians. When we see that the tradition which names Paul as ! author does not possess an authentic historical basis, we are necessarily carried on to deny historical authority to ths subsidiary conjectures or traditions which speak of Luke and Clement of Rome. The history of the Alexan drian tradition shows that these names were brought in merely to lessen the difficulties attaching to the view that Paul wrote the book exactly as we have it. The name of Luke sesms to be a conjecture of the Alexandrian Clement, for it has no place in the tradition received from his master. And Origan attaches no importance to either name. Some hii mentioned one, and some the other, but God alone knows the truth. We have no reason to think more highly of these suggestions than Origen did. Indeed, no Protes tant scholar now proposes the name of Clement, whose extant epistle to the Corinthians shows his familiarity with the epistle to the Hebrews, and at the same time excludes the idsa thit he composed it. The name of Luke has still partisans most notably Delitzsch, who has carefully collectei linguistic parallels between our epistle and the Lucan writings (Commentar zum Hebraerbrief, Leipsic, 1857; Eiglish translation, Edinburgh, 1868-70). The arguments of Delitzsch are generally met with the objection that our author must have been a born Jew, which from Ids standpoint and culture is in the highest degree probable, though not perhaps absolutely certain. In any case we cannot suppose that Luke wrote the epistle on Paul s com mission, or that the work is substantially the apostle s ; for such a theory takes no account of the strongly-marked individuality of the book in thought and method as well as expression. And the theory that Luke was the independent author of the epistle (Grotius and others) has no right to appeal to antiquity, and must stand entirely on the very inadequate grounds of internal probability afforded by language and style. If Alexandria fails us, can we suppose that Africa pre served the original tradition ? This is a difficult question. The intrinsic objections to authorship by Barnabas are not important. The so-called Epistle to Barnabas was not written by our author, but then it is admittedly not by Barnabas. The superior elegance of the style of our epistle as compared with that of Paul is not inconsistent with Acts xiv. 12; nor is there, as we shall see presently, any real force in the once favourite objection that the ordinances of the temple are described with less accuracy than might be looked for in Barnabas, a Levite and one who had resided in Jerusalem. On the other hand it is hard to believe that the correct account of the authorship of our book was pre served only in Africa, and in a tradition so isolated that Tertullian seems to be its only independent witness. How could Africa know this thing and Rome be ignorant ? Zahn, who is the latest exponent of the Barnabas hypo thesis, argues that in the West, where the so-called epistle of Barnabas was long unknown, there was nothing to suggest the idea of Barnabas as an author ; that the true tradition might perish the more readily in other parts of the church after the name of Barnabas had been falsely attached to another epistle dealing with the typology of ths ceremonial law ; and finally, that the false epistle of 1 The place of the epistle in MSS. varies. The order of our Bible is that of the Latin Church, the oldest Greek codices placing it before the pastoral epistles. But the Latin order, which expresses the original uncertainty of the Pauline tradition, was formerly current even in the East. Barnabas, which was first so named in Alexandria, may there have carried off the true title of the epistle to the Hebrews after the latter was ascribed to Paul. That is not plausible, and it is more likely that an epistle which calls itself Xoyos 7ra.pa.Kri&amp;lt;re&amp;lt;D&amp;lt;s (Heb. xiii. 22) was ascribed to the wos TrapaKrj&amp;lt;Tf(ii&amp;lt;; (Acts iv. 36) in the same way as Ps. cxxvii. was ascribed to Solomon, &quot; the beloved of the Lord &quot; (2 Sam. xii. 24, 25), from the allusion cxxvii. 2, than that this coincidence of expression affords a confirmation of the Barnabas hypothesis. In short, the whole tradition as to the epistle is too uncertain to offer much support to any theory of authorship, and if the name of Barnabas is accepted it must stand mainly on internal evidence. Being thus thrown back on what the epistle itself can tell us, we must look at the first readers, with whom, as we have already seen, the author stood in very close relations. It is generally agreed that the church addressed was com posed of Hebrews or Christians of Jewish birth. We are not entitled to take this simply on the authority of the title, which is hardly more than a reflexion of the impression produced on an early copyist. But it is plain that the writer is at one with his readers in approaching all Christian truth through the Old Testament, He and they alike are accustomed to regard Christianity as a continuous develop ment of Judaism, in which the benefits of Christ s death belong to the ancient people of God and supply the short comings of the old dispensation (iv. 9; ix. 15; xiii. 12). With all the weight that is laid on the superiority of Christianity, the religion of finality, over Mosaism, the dis pensation which brought nothing to its goal, the sphere of the two dispensations is throughout treated as identical, without any allusion, such as could hardly have been avoided in addressing a Gentile church, to the way in which strangers and foreigners (Eph. ii. 19) had been incorporated with the. people of God. Schurer indeed (Stud. u. Krit., 1876, p. 776) has sought such an allusion in vi. 1, 2, where faith in God and belief in the resurrection and the judgment, points common to Judaism and Christianity, are reckoned to the elementary doctrine of Christ ; and he con cludes that the readers addressed were Gentile converts of a Judaizing type. But taken with the context these verses imply only that the Hebrews required to be warned against losing hold even of these first principles of revealed truth which lie in the Old Testament (v. 12). From all this we are not perhaps entitled to conclude that the church addressed contained no Gentile members, but it is plain that they were not sufficiently numerous and independent in their way of thought to affect the general type of Christianity in the community. To some writers the emphatic &quot;all&quot; in xiii. 24, the admonitions x. 25, xiii. 17, have suggested the possibility that the Hebrews addressed were but part, and a somewhat discontented part, of a larger community in which Gentile elements has a consider able place. . But this appears a strained conclusion (Phil, iv. 21 ; 1 Th. v. 26) distinctly contrary to the general tone of the epistle, which moves altogether outside of the anti thesis between Jewish and Gentile Christianity. We must think not of a party but of a church, and such a church can be sought only in Palestine or in one of the great centres of the Jewish dispersion. That the epistle was addressed to Palestine, or more specifically to Jerusalem, has been a prevalent opinion from the time of Clement of Alexandria, mainly because it was assumed that the word Hebrews must naturally mean Jews, whose mother-tongue was Aramaic. But the term has this restricted sense only when put in contrast to Hellenists. In itself, according to ordinary usage, it simply denotes Jews by race, and in Christian writings especially Jewish Christians. And there are several things in the epistle that seem to exclude Palestine, and above all Jerusalem. The Hellenistic cul-