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corpus-paul - [Corpus-Paul] Why was Hebrews ever thought to be by Paul?

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  • From: "David C. Hindley" <dhindley AT compuserve.com>
  • To: "Corpus-Paul" <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Corpus-Paul] Why was Hebrews ever thought to be by Paul?
  • Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 11:15:53 -0400

Dave Inglis asks:

>>What evidence is there to suggest why Hebrews was ever considered to have
been written by Paul? Given the differences between Hebrews and the other
Paulines, why would anyone think that Paul wrote it? Is it possible that it
was a simple mistake - an accident, in fact?<<

Hebrews is a strange one. The other letters of the Pauline corpus tend to
append phrases and sections of text related to Christ theology to a fairly
coherent text that appears to be talking about other things entirely, making
the Christ theology "hard to understand" as the author of 2 Peter comments
(3:16).

Hebrews, while maintaining the format of an epistle, mainly seems to
concentrate on expanding the Christ theology and making it coherent and
understandable. If you are a "Christian" it is because of Christ theology,
so those Christians who were interested in it would have a predisposition to
believe a letter that claims to be from Paul and "explains" it all is indeed
"Paul's."

It does also contain characteristics suggestive of a genuine letter (the
greetings, etc), but I suppose that these can be based on portions of an
otherwise unpublished "genuine" letter or, if one is in the camp that thinks
the pastorals are inauthentic, from whatever founts of imagination that
created these features in those letters.

>>Suppose for a minute that the writer of P46 was simply putting together a
collection of letters written to churches, or even was simply putting
together a collection of the letters in his possession at the time. Could
later readers just have *assumed* that it must have been a collection of
letters purely from Paul? What evidence is there for the Hebrews/Paul
association having been made independently of P46?<<

If I remember correctly, the scribe who copied out p46 did so differently
than other collections, in that s/he seemed to have used letter length as
the criterion for arranging the letters, while the others tend to group them
as we usually find them in mss of later time. Davis Trobisch discusses this
in length, as you probably know.

The position of Hebrews in the corpus is a wild card, as it is the one
letter whose position varies the most and is also found in more positions
than other variant letters (and there aren't many of these). This is very
suggestive that it is being added to the collections of letters as an
afterthought.

Since it really requires a familiarity with the other Paulines to be
understood completely, I doubt that it circulated independently, although
this kind of variability would normally suggest that. As a result, I'd
attribute its inclusion into the corpus as the work of publishers (houses of
copyists who copied out works for sale or distribution to Christian
churches, or to be used as recruitment literature, or to serve propaganda
purposes).







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