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

NPNF (V1-14)St. ChrysostomThe authorship of Clement of Rome may also be set aside on two grounds: (1) That he quoteslargely from this Epistle with the whole air of one citing from a higher authority to confirm hisown teachings; and (2) that his own manner and style, as well as intellectual power, is so unlike asto 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 orless fully, and translated by St. Luke or St. Clement, or some other of his companions more or lessparaphrastically, can find no favor with the modern scholar. If such a supposition is meant to leavethe work essentially a translation, it encounters all the difficulties already mentioned against thePauline authorship, and besides is opposed to abundant evidence that the work was originally writtenin Greek. “It abounds in compound words which are essentially Greek, which have no analoguesin Aramaic or in Hebrew,” 2653 and it contains paronomasia , entering into the thought, which couldonly be possible in Greek. If, on the other hand, it is meant to express merely some connection ofSt. 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 Epistleare concerned, Origen urges the beauty of the thoughts, and there must be some force in thisargument, or the Epistle could hardly have been so long and so widely attributed to him. Perhapsit may be summed up in the words of an eminent and now departed divine, 2654 “If the Epistle werenot written by St. Paul, then we have the remarkable phenomenon that there were two men amongthe Christians of that age who were capable of writing it.” The theory has also a certain primâ facieprobability, and offers a convenient way of reconciling the conflict of the external evidence. Butof 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 markeddifference in its construction from any of St. Paul’s Epistles. The omission of his name at thebeginning has been more or less satisfactorily accounted for from ancient times, but the reasonsfor this do not apply to the absence of any sort of salutation, “any heading or introductorythanksgiving,” by which St. Paul always takes pains to conciliate his readers, and of which therewas 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 anysort of preface. Another striking feature of difference is, that St. Paul always keeps close to hisargument until it is complete, and then adds practical exhortations founded upon it, while in ourEpistle each short division of the argument is separated from that which follows by its appropriatepractical application. This indicates quite a different habit of mind, and it is difficult to fancy sucha severely logical reasoner as St. Paul thus pausing in the flow of his argument. The style of theEpistle is so markedly different from that of St. Paul that attention has been drawn to this pointfrom the time of Origen down. The “rounded oratorical periods” of the Hebrews are very unlikethe “unstudied, broken, abrupt phraseology” of St. Paul. This difference might, in part at least, beaccounted for as the work of the translator; only in that case, the translator could have been neitherSt. Luke, whose style is clear and smooth enough, but not at all oratorical, nor Clement, whosestyle is very unlike.2653Godet in The Expositor , April, 1888, p. 262.2654Bp. George Burgess.507