The LCMS Wednesday Bible Study was on the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Here are some items. Occasionally, I’ll quote from the pastor’s
handout.
A. In terms of the audience of Hebrews, the pastor mentioned two
possibilities. First, it could have been a house church in Jerusalem,
Judea, or Galilee. Second, it could have been a house church of Jewish
Christians, maybe priests, in Rome during Emperor Claudius or Nero.
I asked why the Epistle is written in Greek rather than Aramaic, if
its audience was located in Palestine. The pastor, of course, narrated
how Alexander the Great’s conquests made Greek the lingua franca of the
time. Greek was the language of commerce, and people communicated with
each other in it. The pastor also drew parallels with the time when
French was the language of diplomacy and German was the language of
science; his point may have been that the Jews of Palestine spoke both
Aramaic and Greek. The pastor cautioned, however, that, if Hebrews were
written to Palestine, it would probably be written in koine Greek, the
common language of the people, rather than the sophisticated Greek that
Hebrews actually manifests.
I would like to quote something that I wrote in a draft of one of my
dissertation chapters. I am discussing burial inscriptions in
Palestine, some of which are in Hebrew, and some of which are in Greek:
“On the question of why these inscriptions in the land of Israel are in
Greek, Louis Feldman speculates that ‘perhaps it was intended to deter
non-Jewish passers-by from molesting the graves.’ Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 14. Feldman does not believe that
many Jews in first century C.E. Palestine were fluent in Greek. There
is scholarly debate, however, about the extent to which Jews in Late
Antiquity knew Greek. See John C. Poirier, ‘The Linguistic Situation in
Jewish Palestine in Late Antiquity,’ Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism
4 (2007): 110-125. Poirier states that a desire for social status may
have been a factor driving the growing influence of Greek, and also that
Greek may have been prevalent in certain pockets of Palestine.”
This could explain why Hebrews could be written in Greek, while
having a Palestinian audience: some Jews embraced Greek due to a desire
for social status, or there were pockets of Palestine where Greek was
prevalent, and Hebrews was written to a house church in such a pocket.
Other possibilities that I would like to toss out there: perhaps they
are Hellenistic Jews, or there are Gentiles associating with the Jewish
Christians, and the author of Hebrews writes in Greek, the common
language of Jews and Gentiles, so that both can understand it.
On the possibility that Hebrews was written to Jewish priests who had
become Christians, I have issues with this proposal. The argument
seems to be based on the idea that Hebrews manifests a knowledge of the
Temple, which priests would have. However, Hebrews focuses on the
Tabernacle, not the Temple. One does not need intimate knowledge of the
Temple to understand Hebrews, just the Books of Exodus and Leviticus.
In addition, some have argued that Hebrews gets the Tabernacle wrong,
placing the golden altar of incense inside the Holy of Holies with the
Ark rather than outside of the Holy of Holies (cp. Hebrews 9:3-4; Exodus
30:1-6; 40:26); see here,
though, for a conservative Christian attempt to harmonize that apparent
difficulty. At the same time, Hebrews does focus on the cult, and
priests especially would appreciate that.
The pastor speculated that Hebrews was written “before Nero’s
persecutions in AD 68 but after earlier persecutions in Rome—-AD 54.”
Christians were beaten and their property was confiscated, but they were
not yet brutally martyred. The pastor said that the Jewish Christians
may have noticed that, overall, the Roman authorities left the Jews
alone, so they contemplated going back to Judaism. The Epistle was
written to discourage that.
B. The pastor argued that Hebrews was challenging Greek
philosophical notions about God, particularly those of Aristotle. Greek
philosophical notions held that God was perfect and pure, and thus
removed from humanity. God interacted with people through angelic
intermediaries, for God was too pure to interact with them himself.
Moreover, God could not change, as human beings did. Hebrews, by
contrast, depicts Christ, the Son of God, becoming a human being and
thereby a brother of human beings. Moreover, Hebrews depicts Christ,
not angels, as the mediator between God and humanity.
The pastor talked some about this last Sunday, in his class on I
John. He said that the Docetists claimed that Jesus only appeared to be
human because they opposed any notion that God could become a human
being. The pastor was differentiating between what Greek philosophy
said about the divine and how Greek mythology depicted gods. Greek
mythology, of course, depicted gods directly interacting with human
beings and possessing attributes of humans, which differs from Greek
philosophy. I asked the pastor to unpack that. He replied that the
stories of Greek mythology were believed to be ways to communicate with
the common people: to tell them about the divine in a way that they
could understand. The stories also helped common people explain things:
they are having a bad day, so it must be because Zeus was punishing
them.
I took a class years ago on pagan allegory. Certain Greeks took
issue with Greek mythological depictions of gods. They did not care for
gods with flawed human attributes, so they allegorized them rather than
taking them literally. Did only the intellegentsia do this, or did the
non-intelligentsia do so as well? Well, Docetism was a challenge that
John’s church at Ephesus faced, so Greek philosophical beliefs about the
divine apparently impacted the popular level, not just the
intellegentsia.
C. The pastor said that Hebrews believes that the Old Testament
saints were forgiven through the death and resurrection of Christ; Paul,
by contrast, thought that forgiveness was held in abeyance until
Christ’s death and resurrection. Not much detail was provided, but I
have wondered about this in the past. Does the New Testament present a
retroactive application of the blood of Christ to the Old Testament
saints? Both Paul and Hebrews maintain that there were “righteous”
people in the Old Testament: Abraham was justified by faith, and Hebrews
lists heroes of the faith. Could they be that, without possessing
divine forgiveness?
More can be said, but I will stop here. I will leave the comments
open, in case anyone wants to provide additional information. Just
don’t put me down for not knowing things that I probably should know!