Epistle was deeply imbued with the thoughts and phraseology of the Alexandrian school. The coincidences in thought and language between passages of this Epistle and the writings of Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, are such as no one in his senses can believe to be fortuitous. These are for the most part noticed in the references, and the Commentary, in my Greek Testament. 156. These coincidences may have arisen from one of two reasons: either merely from the Author being acquainted with the writings of Philo, or from his having been educated in the same theological school with that philosopher, and so having acquired similar ways of thought and expression. The latter of these alternatives is on all grounds, and mainly from the nature of the coincidences themselves, the more probable. By birth or by training, he was an Alexandrian; not necessarily the former, for there were other great schools of Alexandrian learning besides the central one in that city, one of the most celebrated of which was at Tarsus, the birth-place of the apostle Paul. So that this consideration will not of itself fix the authorship on that companion of St. Paul whom we know to have been an Alexandrine by birth. 157. g) The author was not an Apostle, nor, in the strictest sense, a contemporary of the Apostles, so that he should have seen and heard our Lord for himself. He belongs to the second rank, in point of time, of apostolic men,-to those who heard from eye and ear-witnesses. This will follow from the consideration of the passage ch. ii. 3, in parr. 130-132 above. 158. h) We may add to the above data some, which although less secure, yet seem to be matters of sound inference from the Epistle itself. Of such a character are, e. g., that the author was not a dweller in or near Jerusalem, or he would have taken his descriptions rather from the then standing Jewish temple, than from the ordinances in the text of the Septuagint version:-that he was a person of considerable note and influence with those to whom he wrote, as may be inferred from the whole spirit and tone of his address to them: that he stood in some position of previous connexion with his readers, as appears from the words "that I may be restored to you," ch. xiii. 19: that he lived and wrote before the destruction of Jerusalem. 159. 2. It will be impossible to apply the whole of these data to the enquiry respecting individual men, without assuming, with regard to the last two mentioned at least, the result of the two following sections, "For what readers the Epistle was written," and "The place and time of writing." I shall therefore suspend the consideration of those tests till the results shall have been arrived at, and meantime 9 See below, § ii. par. 36, and § iii. par. 4. apply the others to such persons as are given us by history to choose from. 160. These are the following: Barnabas, Luke, Clement, Mark, Titus, Apollos, Silvanus, Aquila. These are all the companions of St. Paul, who were of note enough to have written such an Epistle : with the exception of Timotheus, who is excluded from the list, by being mentioned in the Epistle (ch. xiii. 23) as a different person from the Author. 161. Of these, TITUS is excluded by the fact mentioned Gal. ii. 3,—that he was a Greek, and not circumcised even at the time when he accompanied St. Paul in his third journey to Jerusalem, Acts xv. 2, 3 ff. 162. It is doubtful, whether a like consideration does not exclude ST. LUKE from the authorship of our Epistle. Certainly the first appearance of Col. iv. 10-14 numbers him among those who were not of the circumcision. Were this so, it would be impossible to allot him more than a subordinate share in the composition. This has been felt, and the hypothesis which takes him to have been the writer has been shaped accordingly. Thus we have seen above Clement of Alexandria held him to have translated the Epistle into Greek': and the idea that he wrote it under the superintendence of St. Paul, incorporating the thoughts of the great Apostle, has been of late revived, and defended with considerable skill, by Delitzsch. And such, more or less modified, has been the opinion of many, both ancients and moderns: of Luculentius, Primasius (Cent. VI.), Haymo (died 853), Rhabanus Maurus (about 847): and of Grotius, Crell, Stein, Köhler, Hug, Ebrard: several of the latter holding the independent authorship of St. Luke, which Delitzsch also concedes to have been possible. 163. And certainly, could we explain away the inference apparently unavoidable from Col. iv. 14, such a supposition would seem to have some support from the Epistle itself. The students of the Commentary in my Greek Test. will very frequently be struck by the verbal and idiomatic coincidences with the style of St. Luke. The argument, as resting on them, has been continually taken up and pushed forward by Delitzsch, and comes on his reader frequently with a force which at the time it is not easy to withstand. 164. Yet, it must be acknowledged, the hypothesis, though so frequently and so strongly supported by apparent coincidences, does not thoroughly approve itself to the critical mind. itself to the critical mind. We cannot feel convinced that St. Luke did really write our Epistle. The whole tone of the individual mind, as far as it appears in the Gospel and Acts, is so essentially different from the spirit of the Writer here, that verbal and idiomatic coincidences do not carry us over the difficulty of supposing the two to be 1 See par. 14. written by one and the same. There is nothing in St. Luke of the rhetorical balance, nothing of the accumulated and stately period, nothing of the deep tinge which would be visible even in narrative, of the threatening of judgment. Within the limits of the same heavenly inspiration prompting both, St. Luke is rather the careful and kindly depicter of the blessings of the covenant, our Writer rather the messenger from God to the wavering, giving them the blessing and the curse to choose between : St. Luke is rather the polished Christian civilian, our Writer the fervid and prophetic rhetorician. The places of the two are different: and it would shake our confidence in the consistency of human characteristics under the influence of the Holy Spirit, were we to believe Luke, the beloved Physician and Evangelist, to have become so changed, in the foundations and essentials of personal identity, as to have written this Epistle to the Hebrews. 165. If the preceding considerations have any weight, we must regard the coincidences above mentioned as the result of common education and manner of speech, and of common derivation of doctrine from the same personal source. St. Luke had derived his style from the same Alexandrine scholastic training, his doctrine from the same father in the faith, as the Writer of our Epistle. 166. It appears never to have been advanced as a serious hypothesis, that ST. MARK is the Writer of our Epistle. There are no points of coincidence between it and his Gospel, which would lead us to think so. He does not appear, after St. Paul's second missionary journey, ever to have been closely joined for any considerable time in travel or in missionary work with that Apostle: and again, he seems to have been a born Jerusalem Jew (Acts xii. 12: see Introd. to Vol. I. ch. iii. § 1), which, by what has been before said, would exclude him. 167. The fact that SILVANUS, or Silas, belonged to the church at Jerusalem (Acts xv. 22), would seem to exclude him also. In other points, our tests are satisfied by him. He was the constant companion of St. Paul: was imprisoned with him at Philippi (Acts xvi. 19 ff.), while Timotheus remained at large: is ever named by the Apostle before Timotheus (Acts xvii. 14, 15, xviii. 5; 2 Cor. i. 19; 1 Thess. i. 1; 2 Thess. i. 1) and afterwards is found in close connexion with St. Peter also (1 Pet. v. 12). It must be acknowledged, that as far as mere negative reasons are concerned, with only the one exception above named, there seems no cause why Silvanus may not have written our Epistle. But every thing approaching to a positive reason is altogether wanting. We : ? This remark especially applies to that portion of St. Luke's writings which would be sure by the merely superficial observer to be cited as furnishing an answer to it; viz. the prologue to his Gospel. No two styles can be more distinct, than that of this preface, and of any equally elaborated passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews. know absolutely nothing of the man, his learning, his particular training, or the likelihood that he should have given us such an Epistle as we now possess. His claim is (with that one reservation) unexceptionable but it must retire before that of any who is recommended by positive consi derations". 168. A far stronger array of names and claims is made out for CLEMENT OF ROME, one of the fellow-workers of St. Paul in Phil. iv. 3. We have seen above (par. 19), that his name was one brought down to Origen by the "account which has come down to us," together with that of St. Luke: we have found him mentioned as held by some to be the translator, e. g., by Euthalius (par. 46), Eusebius (par. 48): the author, by Philastrius (par. 65), Jerome (par. 69), &c. This latter has in modern times been the opinion of Erasmus (par. 97), and of Calvin (par. 100). 169. We cannot pronounce with any certainty whether Clement was a Jew by birth or not. The probability is against such a supposition. The advocates of this theory however rest his claim mainly on the fact that many expressions and passages of our Epistle occur in the (undoubtedly genuine) Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians. 170. But to this it has been satisfactorily replied by Bleek and others, that such passages have much more the air of citations, than that of repetitions of the same thought and diction by their original author, and that they in fact in no wise differ from the many other reproductions of passages of the New Test., especially of St. Paul's Epistles, in the same letter of Clement. Bleek has besides directed attention to the great dissimilarity of the two writings, as indicating different authors. Clement's Epistle has nothing of the Alexandrine character, nothing of the speculative spirit, of that to the Hebrews. His style is pure and correct, but wants altogether the march of periods, and rhetorical rhythm, of our Epistle. Another objection is, that had Clement written it, there could hardly have failed some trace of a tradition to that effect in the church of Rome; which, as we have seen, is not found. 171. The idea that BARNABAS was the author of our Epistle seems to have been prevalent in the African Church, seeing that Tertullian quotes him as such without any doubt or explanation (above, par. 25). But it was unknown to Origen, and to Eusebius: and Jerome, in his Catalog. c. 5, vol. ii. p. 838, says "either of Barnabas according to Tertullian, or of the Evangelist Luke according to some, or of Clement, &c. :" so that 3 Mynster and Böhme, from different points of view, have held to Silvanus: the former, assuming that our Epistle was sent with that to the Galatians, and to the same churches: the latter, fancying a great resemblance between our Epistle and the first of St. Peter, and holding it to have been written under the superintendence of that apostle a supposition, I need not say, entirely untenable. it is probable that he recognized the notion as Tertullian's only. And we may fairly assume that Philastrius (par. 65) and others refer to the same source, and that this view is destitute of any other external support than that which it gets from the passage of Tertullian'. 172. It must then, in common with the rest, stand or fall on internal grounds. And in thus judging of it, we have two alternatives before us. Either the extant Epistle of Barnabas is genuine, or it is not. In the former case, the question is soon decided. So different are the styles and characters of the two Epistles, so different also the view which they take of the Jewish rites and ordinances, that it is quite impossible to imagine them the work of the same writer. The Epistle of Barnabas maintains that the ceremonial commands were even at first uttered not in a literal but in a spiritual sense: finds childish allusions, e. g., in Greek numerals, to spiritual truths: is in its whole diction and character spiritless, and flat, and pointless. If any one imagines that the same writer could have indited both, then we are clearly out of the limits of ordinary reasoning and considerations of probability. 173. But we may take the other and more probable alternative: that the so-called Epistle of Barnabas is apocryphal. Judging then of Barnabas from what we know in the Acts, many particulars certainly seem to combine in favour of him. He was a Levite, not of Judæa, but of Cyprus (Acts iv. 36): he was intimately connected with St. Paul during the early part of the missionary journeys of that Apostle (Acts ix. 27, xv. 41), and in common with him was entrusted with the first ministry to the Gentiles (Acts xi. 22 ff., xv. 12 &c.; Gal. ii. 9 &c.): he was called by the Apostles (Acts iv. 36) by a name which we have seen reason to interpret 'son of exhortation.' 174. These particulars are made the most of by Wieseler, as supporting what he considers the only certain tradition on the subject. But as we have seen this tradition itself fail, so neither will these stand under stricter examination. For Barnabas, though by birth a Cyprian, yet dwelt apparently at Jerusalem (Acts ix. 27, xi. 22): and there, by the context of the narrative, must the field have been situated, which he sold to put its price into the common stock. As a Levite, he must have been thoroughly acquainted with the usages of the Jerusalem temple, which, as before observed, our Writer does not appear to have been. It is quite out of the question to suppose, as Wieseler does, that Barnabas, a Levite who had dwelt at Jerusalem, would, during a subsequent ministration in Egypt, have cited the usages of the temple at Leon. topolis rather than those at Jerusalem. If such usages have been cited, it must be by an Egyptian Jew to whom Jerusalem was not familiar. 4 It has been upheld in modern times by J. E. Chr.-Schmidt, Twesten, Ullmann, Thiersch, Wieseler. On the last of these, see below, par. 174. |