- Chapters
- 13
- Verses
- 0
- Where it sits
- The Letters of Paul
What it is
It does not open like a letter and it never names its author. It calls itself a word of exhortation, and it is addressed to Jewish Christians who were drifting back — under pressure, or out of longing for a temple that was still standing.
Its argument is a single sustained comparison: Christ is greater than the angels, greater than Moses, and a high priest of a different and older order than Aaron’s — the order of Melchizedek — whose one offering does what the daily sacrifices could not.
Known for
Chapter 11, the roll-call of faith. 4:12. Chapter 7, on Melchizedek.
A note for Orthodox readers
Hebrews gives the fullest priesthood-theology in the New Testament, and its language echoes through the anaphora at every Liturgy. Chapter 11 is read on the Sunday of the Forefathers before the Nativity.
Where it sits
This is the interesting one, and the Church itself said so. Origen, in the third century, observed that the Greek is finer than Paul’s and that the thoughts are not inferior to the apostolic writings, and then concluded: if any church holds this epistle to be Paul’s, let it be commended for that, for the ancients did not hand it down as Paul’s without reason — but who wrote the epistle, in truth, God knows. Jerome reports the same doubt and names Barnabas, Luke and Clement among the guesses.
The East received it early as Pauline; the West hesitated for centuries. The Orthodox Church numbers it among the fourteen epistles of Paul and announces it in the Liturgy as his. That is a judgement about the book’s authority in the Church, which is not the same question as whose hand held the pen — and a Father drew that distinction himself, in writing, in the third century.
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