Theopedia

Epistle to the Hebrews

In these last days [God] has spoken to us by his Son… He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.

— Hebrews 1:2-3 (ESV)

Overview

The Epistle to the Hebrews is a New Testament letter, or “word of exhortation” (Heb. 13:22), written to a predominantly Jewish Christian community tempted to abandon the gospel and return to the ritual-centered system of the old covenant.1 Positioned among the New Testament’s General epistles, it argues throughout that Jesus Christ is God’s final and superior revelation (Heb. 1:1-2) and the mediator of a better covenant (Heb. 7:22; 8:6).2

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Author and Date

The epistle names no author. Unlike each of the thirteen letters that bear Paul’s name, it opens without salutation or self-identification, beginning in the form of an essay before closing in the form of a letter.3 Its vocabulary, style, and manner of argument differ enough from the undisputed Pauline letters that the question of authorship divided opinion from the earliest centuries of the church.3

In the East, where the epistle seems first to have circulated, it was uniformly ascribed to Paul, though not always as his direct, unaided composition. Origen reported that some in Alexandria held that Paul supplied the thoughts while another hand cast them into Greek.3 The Western church was slower to receive it: Clement of Rome cited the epistle as authoritative around AD 96 without naming its author, and it was neither generally credited to Paul nor received into the Western canon until the fourth century.3 Weighing the question himself, Origen concluded only that “the ancients not without reason have handed it down as Paul’s; but on the question who wrote the epistle God only knows the truth.”3

Modern scholarship has not settled the question either. Because the epistle shows real affinities with Pauline thought, and because its readers evidently knew the author well, some interpreters have proposed that a companion of Paul, rather than Paul himself, is responsible for it; noting affinities with Luke’s own vocabulary and style, one recent monograph argues specifically for Lukan authorship.4 No single proposal, ancient or modern, has commanded consensus, and the epistle’s author is best regarded, with the earliest writers who wrestled with the question, as genuinely unknown.1

The letter was most likely written not long before AD 70: its references to the Levitical priesthood and tabernacle worship are consistently in the present tense, as of institutions still functioning, with no mention anywhere of the temple’s destruction.5 Its readers had also known their first leaders long enough to look back on the outcome of their lives (Heb. 13:7), placing the letter a meaningful span after the community’s founding.

Historical and Literary Context

The letter’s original recipients are not named, and their location cannot be fixed with confidence; Rome and Jerusalem have both been proposed.1 What is clear from the letter’s own contents is that they were Jewish Christians who had suffered for their faith (Heb. 10:32-34) and were now tempted to drift back toward the old covenant’s ritual system rather than hold fast to Christ.1 The author writes as an experienced pastor to a struggling congregation, warning, encouraging, and instructing them not to abandon what they had received.1 He closes by urging them to remember their former leaders and imitate their faith (Heb. 13:7), and to submit to those currently watching over their souls (Heb. 13:17).1

Structure

The epistle unfolds in two broad movements. Chapters 1 through 10 build a sustained argument for Christ’s superiority: to the angels through whom the old covenant law was mediated (Heb. 1-2), to Moses as a servant in God’s house where Christ is a son over it (Heb. 3-4), and to the Levitical priesthood, whose repeated sacrifices Christ’s own single, better sacrifice as priest after the order of Melchizedek has rendered obsolete (Heb. 4:14-10:18). Chapters 11 through 13 turn to application: a roll call of Old Testament believers who lived by faith rather than sight (Heb. 11), followed by exhortations to endurance, discipline, and holiness in light of their example (Heb. 12-13).

Major Themes

Christ as God’s final and superior revelation. The epistle opens by setting Christ’s own sonship against the partial, mediated revelation given “at many times and in many ways” through the prophets (Heb. 1:1-3), the perfect and final form God’s self-disclosure has taken.2 Because this revelation comes through God’s own Son, it carries greater weight than the message the angels once mediated at Sinai, and the epistle warns its readers accordingly not to neglect so great a salvation (Heb. 2:1-3).2

Christ’s superior priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. Drawing on the mysterious king-priest of Genesis 14, to whom even Abraham paid tithes, the epistle argues that Christ’s priesthood does not depend on Levitical descent and does not end in death, but continues forever (Heb. 7:1-3, 23-25).6 Where the Levitical priests offered sacrifices for their own sins as well as the people’s, repeated daily because no offering could truly take sin away, Hodge writes that in Hebrews “the priesthood of Christ is elaborately set forth, and its superiority in every respect to the priesthood of the old economy strenuously insisted upon.”7 Bavinck states the same point of Christ himself: he remains the church’s “only priest who, according to the order of Melchizedek, remains forever, continually covers our sins with his sacrifice.”6

The warning passages against apostasy. Interspersed through the epistle’s doctrinal argument are five sustained warnings against falling away, the sharpest of which describes those who were once enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift but then fall away as impossible to renew again to repentance (Heb. 6:4-6). Boyce reads these warnings as real to the persons addressed, a genuine danger considered in themselves, and at the same time as one of the means God uses to restrain true believers from that danger and drive them to persevere.8 On this reading, the warnings are part of how God keeps his own to the end, not a threat that his keeping might fail.8

Faith as the assurance of things hoped for. The epistle’s best-known definition of faith opens its eleventh chapter: “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Bavinck reads this as faith’s subjective side, a settled confidence that what God has promised, though still future and unseen, is as certain as if it were already possessed.9 The chapter then surveys a line of Old Testament believers, from Abel to the prophets, who held fast to God’s promises without receiving them in this life, presented as an example for readers wavering under present pressure to hold fast in turn.

The old covenant’s obsolescence and the new covenant’s better mediator. The epistle repeatedly sets Christ forward as the mediator of a better covenant, established on better promises (Heb. 7:22; 8:6), the priest-king who supersedes the entire apparatus of tabernacle, sacrifice, and Levitical mediation that the old covenant required.2 Because a new covenant has been announced, the epistle argues, the first has been made obsolete, and what is obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away (Heb. 8:13).

Canonicity

Hebrews’ place in the canon was historically bound up with the same uncertainty that surrounded its authorship. Clement of Rome’s citation of it as Scripture-like authority around AD 96 shows early, if anonymous, use; the Eastern churches received it without difficulty, while Western reception lagged, with the Muratorian fragment, representing the pre-fourth-century Western church, omitting it altogether.3 By the fourth century, when Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, and finally the Council of Laodicea listed the New Testament books, Hebrews was included among them, and its place in the canon has not been disputed since.10 The 1689 confession’s own list of canonical books follows this settled reception.11

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

References

  1. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 27, “Hebrews 13:17: They Keep Watch Over Your Souls,” 275-284: “The author of the Letter to the Hebrews is unknown to us, but he was well known to his initial readers… This letter was likely written shortly before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. The recipients were a predominately Jewish Christian community. It is unknown where they were located, but Rome or Jerusalem have been popular suggestions… Their Christ-centered teaching stood in bold contrast to the Jewish ritual-centered teaching to which these readers were tempted to return.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 5, “The Apostolic Origins of the Canon.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 483: “Each of the thirteen preceding epistles bears the name of Paul. But the present epistle is without either name or address… whether we believe, with many, that Paul was its immediate author, or, with Origen, that ‘the ancients not without reason have handed it down as Paul’s; but on the question who wrote the epistle God only knows the truth.’” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  4. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 4, “The Authors of Canon,” 119-154. ↩

  5. Barrows, 485. ↩

  6. Bavinck, chap. 16, “The Exalted Lord Christ.” ↩ ↩2

  7. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 459. ↩

  8. James Petigru Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 433-434. ↩ ↩2

  9. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 19, “Faith and Conversion.” ↩

  10. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 8, “Problem Books and Canonical Boundaries.” ↩

  11. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 2. ↩