The Palestinian hypothesis is not free from difficulty. It appears, at first sight, unlikely that the author would have written in Greek to Palestinian Jewish Christians, whose language was Aramaic, and would have used the Septuagint exclusively in citations from the Old Testament. Neverthe- less, Greek was understood and spoken in Palestine: many Greek-speaking Jews resided in Jerusalem (Acts vi. 9), and there were in that city synagogues of the Cyrenians and Alex- andrians, in which Greek and the Septuagint would certainly be used. The Hellenists were numerous and influential enough to carry their point in the matter of ministration to their widows (Acts vi. 1ff.). Finally, it is not impossible that the writer of the epistle was not sufficiently acquainted with Aramaic to write effectively in that language.
The decisive settlement of the date of the epistle is practic- ally given up by critics. The most that can be done is to try and fix approximately the limits within which the compo- sition was possible.* Only one point is definitely fixed. It must have been written before Clement’s Epistle to the Corin- thians (95). If addressed to Jewish Christians, or indeed to Gentiles, it is highly probable that it was written before the destruction of Jerusalem (70), since it is most unlikely that the writer would have omitted all allusion to an event which furnished such a striking confirmation of his teaching. This probability would be strengthened if it could be proved that the Jewish sacrifices were still being offered at the time when - the epistle was composed: but this cannot be conclusively
ingenious paper, Probabilia iiber die Adresse und den Verfasser des Hebréer- briefs. He holds that the epistle was addressed to a Christian community — a house-church in Rome: that it was written by Aquila and Prisca, princi- pally by the latter, and that, so far from being addressed especially to Hebrew Christians, it entirely ignores the difference between Hebrews and Gentiles.
* The results of even this attempt vary considerably. Bleek, 68-69: Liinemann, 65-67: Riehm, 64-66: Ebrard, end of 62: De Wette, 63-67: Tholuck and Wieseler, about 64: Alford, 68-70: Salmon, before 63: West- cott, 64-67: Jiilicher,- not before 70: Weiss, near 67: Harnack, 65-95: McGiffert, 81-96. One of the fairest and ablest discussions is by Harnack, Chronologie der altchristlichen Litteratur. Jiilicher’s discussion, in his Hin- leitung in das Neue Testament, will also repay study.