The authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews has
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The authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews has never been established and, barring the appearance of new evidence, seems unlikely ever to be determined. No firm tradition ever assigned the document to a particular writer, no statements have ever been discovered that make a solid attribution, and extensive examination of internal evidence has failed to produce anything resembling consensus. Scholars have proposed numerous candidates but such ideas depend almost entirely on internal evidence since as little is known about the audience and date of the letter as is known about the writer. Despite these drawbacks speculation about the author of Hebrews has gone on intermittently for nearly two millennia. This is not speculation for its own sake, however, since the identification of author, audience, and date is intrinsically related to understanding the document. It is the explanatory power of most of these proposals that motivated their authors. A brief discussion of the problems of dating is followed by a summary of the early attributions of Hebrews. The principal candidates for whom claims are still made--Clement of Rome, Apollos, Barnabas, Luke, Priscilla, and Paul--are discussed and the reasons for the rejection of these attributions are summarized. In conclusion it is shown that scholars' growing understanding of the circumstances of Hebrews' composition only increases the difficulty of determining who wrote this epistle. The document known as the Epistle to the
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eone Clement himself considered a reliable Christian authority. Clement's unacknowledged quotation has led some scholars to speculate that Clement himself may have written Hebrews. But this epistle's author not only had "the most accomplished" Greek style in the New Testament, he also ranked, with Paul and John, as "one of [its] three great theologians." Clement's works demonstrate that he could not be compared with this writer--either as a stylist or a theologian.
The level of thought in Hebrews was undoubtedly the source of the tradition--which held from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries--that this was one of Paul's epistles. But little support remains for Pauline authorship. Clement of Rome did not cite Paul when he quoted from Hebrews--though he did so when quoting from I Corinthians--and his silence on this point "may at least indicate that he did not consider Paul its author." Yet Clement of Alexandria agreed with the, apparently predominant, second-century belief in the Eastern Church in Paul's authorship. But he and other Alexandrians recognized the difference between Paul's usual style and that of Hebrews. On literary critical grounds they therefore felt it necessary "to reconcile the Pauline ascription w
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Approximate Word count = 2809
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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