Homilies on the Gospel of St. John and the Epistle to the Hebrews

NPNF (V1-14)St. Chrysostom343Thus far the question of authorship was evidently an open one on which everyone was free tohold his own opinion, or uncertainty of opinion. Tertullian speaks of the authorship of Barnabassimply as a fact, without an allusion to any doubt on the matter. But as the time went on, the attentionof 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. Inthe West there is no trace of any reference of the authorship of the Epistle to St. Paul until themiddle of the fourth century; but after this the opinion spread rapidly, and under the influence ofAugustine, in the year 393 somewhat hesitatingly, but in 419 positively, the provincial council ofCarthage reckoned it among the Pauline Epistles. Augustine himself, however, sometimes expressedhimself 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 anduncertainties of Origen. The assumption of the Pauline authorship was a convenience in maintainingthe authority of the Epistle, and there being almost no one to call it in question, had come to begenerally adopted in St. Chrysostom’s time, and remained almost unquestioned until the revival oflearning 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 externalevidence, we are plainly left free to form our own conclusions from internal evidence. Among thegreat number of authors suggested by different writers, the only names entitled to especialconsideration are those of St. Paul (Chrysostom, Augustine, and later writers generally until moderntimes, but at present the only scholar of weight is Hofmann), St. Luke (besides the views of ancientsgiven above, Calvin, Ebrard, Döllinger, and to a certain extent Delitzsch), Clement of Rome(Erasmus, Reithmaier, Bisping), Silas (Mynster, Böhme, Godet), Apollos (Luther, Semler, DeWette, Tholuck, Bunsen, Kurtz, Farrar, De Pressensé, Bleek, Hilgenfeld, Lünemann, Alford), andBarnabas (Ullmann, Wieseler, Ritschl, Grau, Thiersch, Weiss, Renan, Keil). Of the three first wehave genuine writings with which to make a comparison; of the three last—assuming the spuriousnessof the so-called Epistles of Barnabas—nothing remains.The supposition of the authorship of St. Paul, although so long carelessly held, seems almostforbidden by an expression in the Epistle itself. St. Paul was always most strenuous in assertingthat 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 himselfamong those who had received through the medium of others that Gospel “which at the first beganto be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard Him” ( ii. 3 ). All attemptsto weaken the force of this evidence by considering the passage as merely an instance of the rhetoricalfigure koinosis , in which the writer identifies himself with his readers, and thus attributes to himselfwhat properly belongs only to them, have been unsuccessful. Delitzsch considers that if the Epistlewere the joint work of St. Paul and St. Luke, in which the former only supplied the general courseof thought, leaving its expression entirely to the latter, even this expression, so singularly likeLuke i. 1, 2 , might have been used; but this can only be by a practical surrender of the Paulineauthorship. St. Paul everywhere lays such emphasis on the fact that his presentation of Christiantruth was in no way whatever derived from man, but was from express divine instruction given tohimself personally, that this passage must form a presumption against the Pauline authorship sostrong as to be set aside only by clear and positive evidence. It has already appeared that there isno such external evidence; the internal will be examined below.506