Hebrews: Nobody Knows Who Wrote It

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Nobody knows. It names no author. Some early churches credited it to Paul, and the King James Version’s title calls it Paul’s, but its style and thought are not his. Barnabas, Apollos and Priscilla have all been proposed. In the 240s, the great scholar Origen said that God alone knows who wrote it.

When: Sometime between about 60 and 95. A letter written from Rome around 96 already borrows from it. Whether it was written before or after the Temple fell in 70 is debated.

Written for: Believers, probably of Jewish background, who had been insulted and robbed for following me. Some were drifting away, and the writer urged them to hold on.

What it remembers of me: More about my human weakness than almost any other book after the gospels. That I was in all points tempted like we are (4:15). That I prayed with strong crying and tears (5:7). That I suffered outside of the gate (13:12).

How close it stays to me: Close on strangers, prisoners and sharing. Far on second chances, where it warns that some cannot return.

If you only read three chapters: Hebrews 4, Hebrews 11 and Hebrews 13.

Words to Know

High priest — the chief priest of the Temple in Jerusalem. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, he alone entered the innermost room of the sanctuary.

Melchizedek — a mysterious king and priest who meets Abraham in Genesis 14 and blesses him. He appears in only one other verse of my scriptures, in Psalm 110.

Tabernacle — the tent sanctuary the Israelites carried through the desert, before there was a Temple.

Covenant — a binding agreement. Jeremiah promised a new covenant. Hebrews quotes that promise at greater length than any other book in the New Testament.

The Book in Brief

Hebrews never names its writer or its readers. It begins like a speech and ends like a letter. It opens by saying that God spoke long ago through the prophets and has now spoken through his Son, who is greater than the angels. Chapter 2 adds that I shared our flesh and blood, to help those who are tempted.

Chapters 3 and 4 compare me with Moses, and the readers with the Israelites who died in the desert without entering God’s rest. He warns them not to harden their hearts, and calls me a great high priest who understands their weakness.

Chapter 5 begins a long argument about priests, then scolds the readers for being slow to learn. Chapter 6 warns against falling away and encourages them with God’s promise to Abraham. Chapter 7 says that I am a priest like Melchizedek, the priest and king who blessed Abraham, and a priest forever.

Chapters 8 to 10 explain what I have done. The old priests served in a copy of the heavenly sanctuary and offered sacrifices again and again. The writer quotes Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant, describes the tent in the desert and the Day of Atonement, and says that I offered myself once, so no more sacrifices are needed. He warns again against turning away, reminds the readers how they once endured insults and the loss of their property, and urges them not to give up.

Chapter 11 is a long list of people who lived by faith, from Abel and Noah to Abraham, Moses and Rahab, and many who suffered and died without receiving what was promised. Chapter 12 tells the readers to run the race with their eyes on me, calls hardship God’s training of his children, and sets the fearful mountain of Sinai beside the heavenly Mount Zion.

Chapter 13 gives plain commands. Love one another. Welcome strangers. Remember prisoners. Do not love money. The writer asks the readers to go out to me outside the camp, and to keep on doing good and sharing. He ends with a prayer, news that Timothy has been freed, and greetings from the Italians.

It does not begin like a letter. There is no Paul, to the church in such-and-such a place. It begins like a speech, and a grand one:

God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2).

Near the end, the writer calls his work the word of exhortation, which is what a sermon was called in the synagogues of my time, and he adds, with a straight face after thirteen chapters, for I have written to you in few words (Hebrews 13:22). Then he closes like a letter, with greetings and news that our brother Timothy has been freed (Hebrews 13:23). It is a sermon, sent by post.

Who wrote it

The book’s old title in the King James Version is The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews. Neither Paul’s name nor the word Hebrews appears in the text. Both were added.

The churches of the eastern Mediterranean came to count it as Paul’s. In the oldest surviving collection of Paul’s letters, a papyrus book from about 200, it comes right after Romans. The churches of the West were not convinced. Rome did not fully accept it as Paul’s until the late 300s.¹

The doubts are old and good ones. The Greek is smooth and elegant, very unlike Paul’s rough, rushing sentences. The ideas are different. Paul never calls me a high priest. And the writer says something about himself that Paul would never have said. He says the message was confirmed to us by those who heard (Hebrews 2:3). He learned it secondhand. Paul insisted the opposite, that he didn’t receive it from man (Galatians 1:12).

So who was it? The North African writer Tertullian said Barnabas. Martin Luther suggested Apollos, an educated preacher from Alexandria whom Acts calls mighty in the Scriptures (Acts 18:24). In 1900 a German scholar named Adolf von Harnack proposed Priscilla, the teacher who worked beside Paul, and suggested her name was dropped because she was a woman. One problem with that idea is that the writer uses a masculine word for himself in one place.²

The honest answer is the one Origen gave in a sermon in the 240s: who wrote the letter, God truly knows.¹

Go deeperThe Bible the writer read

Hebrews quotes the scriptures on almost every page, and almost every quotation follows the Greek translation of my people’s scriptures, not the Hebrew. That translation is called the Septuagint. It was begun in Egypt in the 200s BC, for Jews who spoke Greek and could no longer read Hebrew easily.³

Sometimes the Greek and the Hebrew say different things, and Hebrews builds on the Greek. The clearest case is in chapter 10. The writer has me speak the words of a psalm as I come into the world: You didn’t desire sacrifice and offering, but you prepared a body for me (Hebrews 10:5). The Hebrew psalm says something else. The World English Bible, which follows the Hebrew, reads You have opened my ears (Psalm 40:6). The Greek text of the psalm reads “a body” where the Hebrew has “ears,” and the writer takes the Greek at its word. He then argues from it: we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Hebrews 10:10).⁴

The quotations also tell us something about the writer. He read his scriptures in Greek, as most Jews outside the land of Israel did, and he was clearly at home in Greek-speaking Judaism. Some have taken that as a hint toward Apollos, who came from Alexandria. It proves nothing, because Jews in many cities read the Greek Bible.

When you set Hebrews beside the Old Testament in a modern Bible, some quotations will not match. They are not mistakes. The writer was quoting the Bible he had.

A man like you

Here is what I value most in this book.

Many Christians came to picture me as so far above ordinary people that I was never afraid, never unsure, never tempted in any real way. Hebrews will not let you think that.

He was obligated in all things to be made like his brothers (Hebrews 2:17).

For we don’t have a high priest who can’t be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one who has been in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).

And this, which no other letter says: He, in the days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and petitions with strong crying and tears to him who was able to save him from death … though he was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which he suffered (Hebrews 5:7–8).

Strong crying and tears. Learned obedience. The writer was probably thinking of the garden on my last night, where Mark remembers that I began to be greatly troubled and distressed, and fell on the ground, and asked for the cup to be taken away (Mark 14:33–36).

That is true. I was afraid. Whoever wrote this book understood that you cannot trust someone to help you with what he never felt.

A priest like Melchizedek

The longest argument in the book is about priests.

In the Law of Moses, priests came from the tribe of Levi. I did not. It is evident that our Lord has sprung out of Judah, about which tribe Moses spoke nothing concerning priesthood (Hebrews 7:14). So how could I be a priest?

The writer finds his answer in two short passages. In Genesis, a king of Salem named Melchizedek, priest of God Most High, brings out bread and wine and blesses Abraham (Genesis 14:18–19). And in Psalm 110, God says to the king, You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek (Psalm 110:4).

Genesis never mentions Melchizedek’s parents, his birth or his death. So the writer reads him as a figure without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life (Hebrews 7:3), a priest who never stops being one. It is the kind of argument a learned teacher in my time would make, building a great deal on what a verse does not say. Jewish writers of the same period were fascinated by Melchizedek too. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls makes him a heavenly figure who brings judgment and release.⁵

The end of sacrifice

From there the writer makes his central claim. The priests in the Temple offered sacrifices year by year and could never finish the job. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins (Hebrews 10:4). But I offered myself, once at the end of the ages (Hebrews 9:26). One sacrifice, never to be repeated.

Much of the Christian teaching about my death as a sacrifice was worked out in this book. You should know it was an interpretation, made by a brilliant writer reading the Temple rituals of my people as a picture of what my death meant.

And notice where he takes it. If sacrifice is finished, what is left for God’s people to offer? He answers at the very end: But don’t forget to be doing good and sharing, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased (Hebrews 13:16). The sacrifice God wants now is doing good and sharing.

The prophets said that long before. When people complained that I ate with sinners, I sent them back to Hosea: go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13).

Go deeperThe tent, not the Temple

Hebrews has a strange silence. It argues about priests and sacrifices through the long middle of the book, chapters 5 to 10, and never once mentions the Temple in Jerusalem.

It describes the tent in the desert instead, with its lampstand and table, and the golden ark in the innermost room (Hebrews 9:2–5). That tent comes from the book of Exodus. The Temple of my day, rebuilt by King Herod, was different. Its innermost room was empty, because the ark was gone. Josephus, who had been a priest there, says so, and the Mishnah says that a bare stone stood where the ark had been.⁶

Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest went into that room alone with blood, as Leviticus 16 commands. That is the ritual the writer has in mind (Hebrews 9:7). Most likely he argues from the scripture rather than from what he saw in Jerusalem, and the scripture speaks of a tent.

Some readers use the silence to date the book. The writer says that the priests go in continually (Hebrews 9:6) and that every priest stands day by day (Hebrews 10:11), all in the present tense. If the Temple had already been destroyed, they ask, would he not have said so? It would have been his best argument.

Others reply that the present tense proves little. About the year 96, Clement of Rome wrote about the sacrifices in Jerusalem as though they were still going on, long after the Temple was gone.⁷ So the question stays open, which is why the date of this book is given as a range.

Old and new

There is a verse in this book that did real damage, and you should know about it.

The writer quotes Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah (Hebrews 8:8). Then he draws a conclusion: In that he says, “A new covenant”, he has made the first old. But that which is becoming old and grows aged is near to vanishing away (Hebrews 8:13).

For centuries Christians read that to mean that God was finished with the Jewish people, and that the church had replaced them. That teaching has a name, supersessionism, and it helped make contempt for my people seem holy.⁸

Read Jeremiah. The new covenant was promised with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah (Jeremiah 31:31). It was a promise to renew my people, not to replace them. Many churches today have rejected the idea that God broke his covenant with the Jews.

The hall of faith

Chapter 11 is the most loved part of the book.

Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).

Then the writer walks through my scriptures, naming people who lived by faith: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses. Then Rahab, a foreign woman of Jericho, called here Rahab the prostitute (Hebrews 11:31). Then a rush of names: Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets (Hebrews 11:32).

It is a strange and honest list. Samson was a brawler. Jephthah made a vow and killed his own daughter to keep it. David took another man’s wife. The writer did not choose saints. He chose people who kept going.

And then the line that holds the whole chapter together: These all died in faith, not having received the promises (Hebrews 11:13). They were not rewarded in their lifetimes. Some went around in sheep skins and in goat skins; being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated—of whom the world was not worthy (Hebrews 11:37–38).

That is the opposite of what is preached in some churches today, where faith is supposed to bring you health and money. In Hebrews, the heroes of faith were often poor, homeless and killed.

Go deeperStories behind the list in chapter 11

Some lines in chapter 11 do not match any story in the Hebrew scriptures. Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, not accepting their deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection (Hebrews 11:35).

The first sentence recalls the widows whose sons were raised by Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings 17:17–24; 2 Kings 4:32–37). The second most likely points to a book that is not in most Protestant Bibles. In 2 Maccabees, an old scribe named Eleazar and a mother with her seven sons are tortured to death under the Greek king Antiochus IV, in the 160s BC, because they will not break the Law of Moses. Each is offered a way out and refuses. The brothers say that God will raise them up.⁹

Another line may come from outside the Hebrew scriptures as well: They were sawn apart (Hebrews 11:37). Many scholars connect it with a story told among Jews that the prophet Isaiah was sawn in two by the wicked king Manasseh. Hebrews does not name him.¹⁰

Lists of heroes were a favorite way of teaching in my day. Sirach 44 to 50 is a long hymn in praise of Israel’s ancestors, from Enoch down to a high priest of the book’s own time. A dying priest named Mattathias, in 1 Maccabees 2, reminds his sons of Abraham, Joseph, Joshua, David, Elijah and Daniel, to give them courage.¹⁰ Hebrews 11 joins that tradition with one twist. Its heroes do not all win. These all died in faith, not having received the promises (Hebrews 11:13).

No second chance?

Some passages in this book have frightened sensitive readers for centuries.

For concerning those who were once enlightened … and then fell away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance (Hebrews 6:4–6). For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more a sacrifice for sins (Hebrews 10:26).

These verses were written to a congregation under pressure, where some members were drifting away and going back to their old lives. The writer was trying to shake them awake. But taken as a rule, they would mean that a person who falls away can never come back. Martin Luther thought these passages went against the gospels and Paul, and in 1522 he said so in the preface to this book.¹¹

When Peter asked me how many times he had to forgive his brother, I told him seventy times seven (Matthew 18:22). I did not ask anything of Peter that God does not do.

Outside the gate

The last chapter brings it down to earth.

Let brotherly love continue. Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for in doing so, some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in bonds, as bound with them, and those who are ill-treated (Hebrews 13:1–3). Be free from the love of money, content with such things as you have (Hebrews 13:5).

And then this: Therefore Jesus also … suffered outside of the gate. Let’s therefore go out to him outside of the camp, bearing his reproach. For we don’t have here an enduring city (Hebrews 13:12–14).

I was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem, where the city put the things it wanted out of sight. Hebrews tells you where to find me now. Not at the center. Outside the gate, with the strangers, the prisoners and the people the city threw out.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Hebrews 5:7–8, then Mark 14:33–36.

You will find: the same night in two books, with prayers, tears and fear.

Then read Hebrews 11:32–40. Notice how many of the faithful died poor, and without receiving what they were promised.

The Short Version

• Hebrews is a sermon with no author’s name. It is not by Paul, and as Origen said, only God knows who wrote it.
• It insists I was tempted like you and prayed with strong crying and tears.
• It calls me a priest like Melchizedek, whose one sacrifice ends all sacrifices. What is left to offer is doing good and sharing.
• Its line about the old covenant vanishing was used to teach that the church replaced the Jews. Jeremiah promised renewal, not replacement.
• Its heroes of faith often died poor, and it tells you to find me outside the gate.