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  • From: "Jeffrey B. Gibson" <jgibson000 AT mailhost.chi.ameritech.net>
  • To: Corpus-paul <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: C-P: Who wrote Hebrews?
  • Date: Mon, 07 Jun 1999 09:33:41 -0500


Liz Fried wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jeffrey B. Gibson
> > [mailto:jgibson000 AT mpdr0.chicago.il.ameritech.net]
> > Sent: Saturday, June 05, 1999 10:23 AM
> > To: Corpus-paul
> > Subject: Re: C-P: Who wrote Hebrews?

>> Far more interesting, I think, that the question of who wrote Hebrews is
>> the question >
>> of WHY whoever wrote it did so.
>>
>> I would want to argue that an answer to THIS question must take serious
>> consideration of Alexander Nairne's older, and far-too-often neglected
>> hypothesis that Hebrews was written to Christians in or near Palestine in
>> response
>> to the out-break of the Jewish war and the "temptation" it held for
>> Christians to join
>> in the nationalistic crusade. This, it seems to me, is a fruitful
>> context of
>> interpretation, far more so than Alexandria. What was going on in
>> Alexandria that
>> would move Christians not only to abandon their faith but to do so in a
>> way that its
>> tantamount to "recrucifying the son of god" as the author notes his
>> readers are in
>> danger of doing?
>>
> No one has responded to this, so I suspect no one has any ideas to put
> forward. Perhaps it would be fruitful to discuss the "when" before we
> discuss the "why." The hypothesis you propose assumes a background of the
> war against Rome. What in the book leads to that conclusion?
>
> Best,
> Liz

Liz,

I don't have Nairne close at hand to cull from his work his reasons for
locating
Hebrews where and when he does. But let me answer -- with the hope of
initiating
discussion on this point from C-P members -- by giving you some thought's
penned long
ago on why (what I did not then know was) Nairne' position seems sound. The
thoughts
are lifted whole from the preface to my _The Temptations of Jesus in Early
Christianity_ and they give some inkling as to why I decided to pursue the
investigation of the NT traditions of Jesus under PEIRASMOS.

I hope this illuminates things,

Yours,

Jeffrey Gibson

******


The origins of this present work date back to my undergraduate days at Oxford
and lay
particularly in an assignment given me by John Muddiman, then my New
Testament tutor
(and of late my thesis advisor), to see what I could make of the question of
the
occasion of the Epistle to the Hebrews. I had, at the time of the assignment,
never
read the Epistle, let alone any of the secondary literature dealing with it
or the
discussions of its background in the standard New Testament `Introductions'.
So I had
no predispositions toward a particular answer on the question at hand nor any
knowledge of what scholarship had argued on this matter. All I knew was that,
because
of the silence of the Epistle itself on the matter of why it was written and
the
absence of any reliable external information or tradition which might provide
clues in
this regard, determining what had been the occasion of the Epistle would
involve a
process of inference, working backwards from those passages which seemed to
speak, if
only indirectly, of the situation that the Epistle's readers found themselves
in to
the situation itself. So, primed and ready to discover or be struck by just
such
passages, I began to read the work. I did not have to read long before they
began to
appear.
I found from the beginning of the second chapter onwards, and then piled
closely
one upon another, passages which seemed worthy of note: verses speaking of the
possibility of the readers `drifting away' (PARARREW) through disobedience
(PARAKOH)
to what had been revealed to them of God's ways in his Son (2.1, cf. 3-5;
3.12-13;
4.1-2) as well as of the necessity of holding fast (KATECW/KRATEW) and
remaining
steadfast in faithfulness to an `assurance' (hUPOSTASEWS), a `confidence'
(PARRHSIAS),
a `hope' (ELPIDOS) and an original `confession' (hOMOLOGIA) to which they had
some
time ago committed themselves even though a present crisis, a painful and
trying `time
of need', seemed to throw doubt on the validity of these things (3.6, 14-15;
4.14).
Then I came to Heb. 4.15 - a passage which, along with 2.17, not only
says that
because of their `confidence' and their faithfulness the readers of the
Hebrews were,
at the time of the Epistle's writing, undergoing "temptations" (PEIRASMOI),
but has as
a basic assumption the conviction that these "temptations" were in essence
the same as
those which both the author and readers of Hebrews knew the earthly Jesus to
have
experienced. And I paused. Bells were ringing. What came to mind as I read
this verse
and its counterpart was a particular passage from John Howard Yoder's The
Politics of
Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), which I had only recently (and, as I
later
thought, serendipitously) read:


Being human, Jesus must have been subject somehow or other to the
testings
of pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. But it does
not
enter into the concerns of the Gospel writer to give us any information
about any struggles he may have had with their attraction. The one
temptation the man Jesus faced - and faced again and again - as a
constitutive element of his public ministry, was the temptation to
exercise
social responsibility, in the interest of justified revolution, through
the
use of available violent methods. Social withdrawal was no temptation for
him; that option... was excluded at the outset. Any alliance with the
Sadducean establishment in the exercise of conservative social
responsibility... was likewise excluded at the outset. We understand
Jesus
only if we can empathize with ... the self-evident, axiomatic, sweeping
rejection of both quietism and establishment responsibility, and the
difficult, constantly reopened, genuinely attractive option of the
crusade
(Politics of Jesus, p. 98).

Accepting without question the truth of Yoder's dual thesis - that within the
Early
Church there was a unified conception of the nature and content of Jesus'
"temptations", and that this conception centered in the idea that the only
point over
which Jesus was ever thought to have been tempted was whether he was going to
be a
warrior king who would liberate his people from oppression through violence -
I placed
this along side of Heb. 4.17 and came up with a sort of exegetical syllogism:

* The author of Hebrews viewed the "temptations" of Jesus as the epitome of
what his
readers were undergoing.

* The author of Hebrews knew that Jesus' "temptations" involved whether or
not, in the
name of God and in pursuit of God's purposes, Jesus would engage in or
advocate a holy
war against his people Israel's oppressors.

* Therefore, the "temptations" that the readers of Hebrew's faced were,
likewise, to
join with theocratically motivated, violent revolutionary forces to defeat
Israel's
enemies.


Having reached this conclusion, naturally the next step was to ask when
within the
first century C.E., and in what particular historical circumstances, would
Christians
have found themselves faced with, let alone attracted to, such an option?
Josephus and
his Jewish War, which I had also recently been reading, provided the answer:
during
the years 66-70 C.E. in the revolt and subsequent war of the Jews against
Rome. Here
erupts a particular cause - the establishment of God's sovereignty in Zion -
to which
any Christian, let alone the readers of Hebrews, would be mightily drawn. Here
Christians were caught up in a moving appeal, at times enforced with less than
salutary means of persuasion, to band together with their religious
compatriots in
active service to their ancestral faith. Here - especially in the initial
stages of
the war which saw such things as the unexpected rout at the foot of the
Temple and the
eventual defeat of the legions of the Roman Legate, Cestius Gallus, the
appointment
and installation of a new High Priest untainted by collaboration with Rome,
and the
purification and rededication of the Temple - insurgent Jewish nationalists,
using
treachery and violence, had seemingly begun to achieve the very thing which
the Sons
of the Covenant had been promised and for which all pious Jews had long
hoped, the
liberation of Israel. And here, too, given the successes enjoyed by these
nationalists
in their military campaigns against the superior might of Rome, was apparent
proof
that the means and methods these men employed to attain their ends actually
enjoyed
divine approval.
Surely, I concluded, the revolt against Rome was the historical
background
against which Hebrews was written, and the probability of its readers being
caught up
in the revolt's allure and all it seemed to promise them the occasion which
prompted
Hebrew's author to take pen in hand. After all, I thought, did not the
author's
exhortations to hold on to what he and his readers had been taught were God's
ways
(3.12; 6.4-6, 11-12), to side with the Christian's new High Priest (4.14;
10.19-25),
to rally round their better altar (13.10), and to move outside the `camp' of
Israel
(Jerusalem) (13.13), come more brilliantly and vibrantly alive under this
particular
assumption of when and why the Epistle was written than under any other? And
did not
his apparent repudiations of the current Jewish high priesthood and
sacrificial
practices (e.g., 9.11-14; 10.1-18) have an especial fit with the ideology of
the
revolt, where these institutions, used as buttresses of, and symbols for, its
revolutionary program, turned the Temple into a hot bed of revolutionary
nationalism,
a `den of LHSTAI', instead of a house of prayer for all nations?


--
Jeffrey B. Gibson
7423 N. Sheridan Road #2A
Chicago, Illinois 60626
e-mail jgibson000 AT ameritech.net






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