Introduction.
by the american reviser.
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In the following Homilies St. Chrysostom assumes throughout St. Paul's authorship of the Epistle, and in his opening Homily deals with considerable ingenuity with several of the most obvious objections to the Pauline authorship.
The Epistle, however, is anonymous, and is not attributed to St. Paul by the most ancient historical testimony which has come down to us, nor is his authorship generally recognized by modern criticism. It is interesting, therefore, to enquire whether St. Chrysostom, in adopting the prevailing view of his time, did so on sufficient grounds.
The history of the matter is very curious. At the close of the second century Tertullian speaks positively and unhesitatingly of the Epistle to the Hebrews as written by Barnabas, the early and long-continued companion of St. Paul. [2649] But there happened to be current in the ancient Church another epistle ascribed to Barnabas, and then commonly received as his, though generally considered spurious. The two epistles were so entirely unlike that no one could well receive them both as from the same author. The result was different in different parts of the Church. In the West, although the Epistle to the Hebrews had been used very largely by Clement of Rome, it came to be discredited altogether, and did not secure general recognition until the fourth century; it was then gradually acknowledged and attributed, at first doubtfully, but afterwards by common consent, to St. Paul. In the East, on the other hand, the Epistle itself was firmly accepted from the first, but with no certain tradition and much questioning in regard to its author. The suggestion of its Pauline authorship seems to have been made by Pantænus, the teacher of Clement of Alexandria, and a contemporary of Tertullian. We have his opinion, however, only at third hand, in a quotation preserved by Eusebius [2650] from a lost work of Clement, and it is impossible to tell on what grounds he rested his opinion, or whether it was a mere personal speculation, like the reason he gives for the omission of the name of St. Paul in connection with the Epistle.
His disciple Clement adopted the suggestion not without hesitation. No one familiar with Greek, which was still the current language of the East, and especially of Alexandria, could fail to be struck by the extreme difference of style between this Epistle and those of St. Paul. Clement, therefore, conjectured that it might have been originally written by St. Paul in Hebrew and translated into Greek by St. Luke. This again is second-hand opinion preserved to us by Eusebius. [2651] Nevertheless, in other works, which are still extant, he frequently cites the Epistle as St. Paul's.
Clement was succeeded in his catechetical office at Alexandria by Origen, a profound thinker and scholar. He was strongly impressed with the difference between the Greek of this and of the Pauline Epistles, and speaks of the matter in different parts of his voluminous works, sometimes suggesting the Clementine hypothesis, sometimes speaking of the variety of opinions and traditions on the subject, sometimes speaking of St. Luke or of Clement of Rome as the probable author, but summing up his perplexity (in language, quoted fully by Eusebius), by saying that who really was the author, God only knows. [2652]
Thus far the question of authorship was evidently an open one on which everyone was free to hold his own opinion, or uncertainty of opinion. Tertullian speaks of the authorship of Barnabas simply as a fact, without an allusion to any doubt on the matter. But as the time went on, the attention of the masters of thought in the Church became more and more engrossed with doctrinal questions, while those of exegesis and criticism more and more lost their interest, especially in the East. In the West there is no trace of any reference of the authorship of the Epistle to St. Paul until the middle of the fourth century; but after this the opinion spread rapidly, and under the influence of Augustine, in the year 393 somewhat hesitatingly, but in 419 positively, the provincial council of Carthage reckoned it among the Pauline Epistles. Augustine himself, however, sometimes expressed himself doubtfully, and although it had now become customary to quote the Epistle as St. Paul's, yet scholars like Jerome, when distinctly treating of the question, express the old doubts and uncertainties of Origen. The assumption of the Pauline authorship was a convenience in maintaining the authority of the Epistle, and there being almost no one to call it in question, had come to be generally adopted in St. Chrysostom's time, and remained almost unquestioned until the revival of learning at the period of the Reformation. Since then, while still remaining a popular impression, it has come to be rejected by the great majority of careful students.
In this variety of opinion from the earliest times, and in the absence of any consistent external evidence, we are plainly left free to form our own conclusions from internal evidence. Among the great number of authors suggested by different writers, the only names entitled to especial consideration are those of St. Paul (Chrysostom, Augustine, and later writers generally until modern times, but at present the only scholar of weight is Hofmann), St. Luke (besides the views of ancients given above, Calvin, Ebrard, Döllinger, and to a certain extent Delitzsch), Clement of Rome (Erasmus, Reithmaier, Bisping), Silas (Mynster, Böhme, Godet), Apollos (Luther, Semler, De Wette, Tholuck, Bunsen, Kurtz, Farrar, De Pressensé, Bleek, Hilgenfeld, Lünemann, Alford), and Barnabas (Ullmann, Wieseler, Ritschl, Grau, Thiersch, Weiss, Renan, Keil). Of the three first we have genuine writings with which to make a comparison; of the three last--assuming the spuriousness of the so-called Epistles of Barnabas--nothing remains.
The supposition of the authorship of St. Paul, although so long carelessly held, seems almost forbidden by an expression in the Epistle itself. St. Paul was always most strenuous in asserting that he had received his apostleship and his knowledge of the truth "not of man, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father" ( Gal. i. 1 ), while the author of this Epistle ranks himself among those who had received through the medium of others that Gospel "which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard Him" ( ii. 3 ). All attempts to weaken the force of this evidence by considering the passage as merely an instance of the rhetorical figure koinosis, in which the writer identifies himself with his readers, and thus attributes to himself what properly belongs only to them, have been unsuccessful. Delitzsch considers that if the Epistle were the joint work of St. Paul and St. Luke, in which the former only supplied the general course of thought, leaving its expression entirely to the latter, even this expression, so singularly like Luke i. 1, 2 , might have been used; but this can only be by a practical surrender of the Pauline authorship. St. Paul everywhere lays such emphasis on the fact that his presentation of Christian truth was in no way whatever derived from man, but was from express divine instruction given to himself personally, that this passage must form a presumption against the Pauline authorship so strong as to be set aside only by clear and positive evidence. It has already appeared that there is no such external evidence; the internal will be examined below.
The authorship of Clement of Rome may also be set aside on two grounds: (1) That he quotes largely from this Epistle with the whole air of one citing from a higher authority to confirm his own teachings; and (2) that his own manner and style, as well as intellectual power, is so unlike as to make the supposition of a common authorship scarcely conceivable.
The early suggestion that the Epistle may have been written in Hebrew by St. Paul, more or less fully, and translated by St. Luke or St. Clement, or some other of his companions more or less paraphrastically, can find no favor with the modern scholar. If such a supposition is meant to leave the work essentially a translation, it encounters all the difficulties already mentioned against the Pauline authorship, and besides is opposed to abundant evidence that the work was originally written in Greek. "It abounds in compound words which are essentially Greek, which have no analogues in Aramaic or in Hebrew," [2653] and it contains paronomasia, entering into the thought, which could only be possible in Greek. If, on the other hand, it is meant to express merely some connection of St. Paul with the thought and line of argument of the Epistle, it really gives up the Pauline authorship, and even this thread of connection may be found in the sequel difficult to retain.
In favor of the authorship of St. Paul so far as the ideas and essential argument of the Epistle are concerned, Origen urges the beauty of the thoughts, and there must be some force in this argument, or the Epistle could hardly have been so long and so widely attributed to him. Perhaps it may be summed up in the words of an eminent and now departed divine, [2654] "If the Epistle were not written by St. Paul, then we have the remarkable phenomenon that there were two men among the Christians of that age who were capable of writing it." The theory has also a certain primâ facie probability, and offers a convenient way of reconciling the conflict of the external evidence. But of course it cannot be accepted merely on these grounds.
At the outset, on a general view of the Epistle, every one must be struck with the marked difference in its construction from any of St. Paul's Epistles. The omission of his name at the beginning has been more or less satisfactorily accounted for from ancient times, but the reasons for this do not apply to the absence of any sort of salutation, "any heading or introductory thanksgiving," by which St. Paul always takes pains to conciliate his readers, and of which there was especial need if he were writing to Hebrews disposed to prejudice against him. On the contrary, after the manner of St. Mark in his Gospel, the writer strikes directly into his subject, without any sort of preface. Another striking feature of difference is, that St. Paul always keeps close to his argument until it is complete, and then adds practical exhortations founded upon it, while in our Epistle each short division of the argument is separated from that which follows by its appropriate practical application. This indicates quite a different habit of mind, and it is difficult to fancy such a severely logical reasoner as St. Paul thus pausing in the flow of his argument. The style of the Epistle is so markedly different from that of St. Paul that attention has been drawn to this point from the time of Origen down. The "rounded oratorical periods" of the Hebrews are very unlike the "unstudied, broken, abrupt phraseology" of St. Paul. This difference might, in part at least, be accounted for as the work of the translator; only in that case, the translator could have been neither St. Luke, whose style is clear and smooth enough, but not at all oratorical, nor Clement, whose style is very unlike.
When we come to details, there are two passages which have been thought to favor a Pauline authorship. There is a quotation in Heb. x. 30 , which, it is alleged, agrees precisely with the same quotation in Rom. xii. 19 , but differs from either the Hebrew or the Greek of Deut. xxxii. 35. The A.V. makes a slight variation in language between Romans and Hebrews, but the Textus Receptus of the original is the same: "Vengeance is mine; I will recompense, saith the Lord." Now the LXX reads, "In the day of vengeance I will recompense"; the Hebrew, "mine [are] vengeance and recompense." If, however, we examine any critical text, we shall find that the clause "saith the Lord," is rejected as a gloss in this Epistle, while undisputed in Romans, thus constituting a difference between them. It is still true, however, that they both differ in the same way from the Hebrew and the LXX. This might be a difficulty were it not that the quotation as it is in this Epistle is found exactly in the Targum, and from that had probably passed into familiar use. Everywhere else the author of Hebrews quotes very closely from the LXX, and from that in what is known as its Alexandrine form, while St. Paul uses the Vatican text, quotes far more loosely, and often follows the Hebrew rather than the Greek.
The other passage really gives no clear indication at all, and as far as it goes, is rather at variance with Pauline authorship. In xii. 23 the writer says, "Know ye that our brother Timothy is set at liberty; with whom, (if he come shortly,) I will see you." It is of course possible that Timothy may have been imprisoned, at Rome or elsewhere, when St. Paul was with him; but as far as we know the history of the two, it seems unlikely. The passage might quite as well have been written by almost any of the companions of St. Paul who were also associated with Timothy.