plating with affectionate sympathy that through which they had been led to see the meaning of the gospel, and finding in it “a welcome, though imperfect source of consolation, instead of a crushing burden, as in Paul’s case” (Westcott).
(5) THE PERSONAL AUTHORITY OF THE WRITER IS WHOLLY IN THE BAcKGROUND. — This is in marked con- trast with the epistles of Paul. He appears to place himself in the second generation of believers to whom the salvation preached by Christ had been certified by ear-witnesses; while Paul refuses to be regarded as a pupil of the apostles, and claims to have received the gospel directly from the Lord, and to have been certified of it by the Spirit.
If Paul was not the author, who was? One claim is about as good as another, and no claim has any substantial support. That of Apollos is founded solely upon Acts xviii. 24 f. ; 1 Cor. i. 12; ii. 4ff. The most that can be deduced from these is that Apollos might have written it. There is no evi- dence that he wrote anything, and that he was learned and mighty in the Scriptures might easily have been true of others. Some modern critics incline to Barnabas, on the strength of the words of Tertullian alluded to above, but this is as unsat- isfactory as the rest.
As regards the destination of the epistle, we are equally in the dark. By ecclesiastical writers from the earliest time it is cited under the title to the Hebrews, a fact which is entitled to some weight. It is evidently addressed to a definite circle of readers, and that circle could hardly have been a mixed church of Jews and Gentiles, since it would have been impos- sible in that case for the letter to avoid allusions to the rela- tions between the two, whereas it contains no allusion to Gentile Christians.
An hypothesis which has obtained considerable currency in modern criticism is, that the epistle was not addressed to Jewish Christians at all, but to Gentile Christians, as a warn- ing against relapsing into heathenism, by showing them from the Old Testament the superiority of Christianity to Judaism.*
* So Pfleiderer, yon Soden, Jiilicher, Weizsaicker, McGiffert.