EarlDoherty

Well, aa, if you or anyone else can seriously think that a whole range of 2nd century apologists (Athenagoras, Theophilus, Minucius Felix, Tatian in his early period) could possibly present a "complete" or "minute" picture of their faith without mentioning an historical Jesus or an atoning crucifixion and yet still be part of a faith which is based on the Gospels and its central character, you are obviously living in a different world than I am.

The fact that such a stream of "Christian" faith could exist at the same time as the Gospels were coming into circulation, and beyond it, shows that the picture of Christianity in its first two centuries is far more diverse and complex than your philosophy, Horatio, is capable of comprehending or admitting. I would suggest that you read my JNGNM chapter on the Second Century Apologists, and my summation at its end about the development of the Christ movement, in order to expand your philosophy and comprehension. But I know that you and others refuse to do anything of the sort.

And just in case you cannot recognize logical fallacies, saying that Athenagoras presents only a mythical Christ/Logos and nothing about the Gospel story, and yet nevertheless knows and believes in that Gospel story, thus allegedly demonstrating that his mythical Christ/Logos is a later development post-dating that unpresented Gospel story which he nonetheless knows so well...well, that's called begging the question, reading one set of documents into another, special pleading (of some bizarre sort), and probably an assortment of others.

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

As with one or two other flies here, I get sucked into responding to him again, until I regain my senses and put away my flyswatter until the next weak moment.

Earl Doherty

aa5874

Your so-called rebuttal is nothing of substance.

There is no actual corroboration for your claims about Epistle Hebrews--None.

It is most disturbing that instead of admitting or exposing the massive problems with NT with regards to False Attribution of authorship, Unknown authorship, bogus chronology, forgeries, interpolation and accounts that were fabricated that you try to put forward the absurd notion that Epistle Hebrews was composed before the Jewish War and does not present a Jesus that was on earth when it is found in a Canon where Jesus was crucified under Pilate in Jerusalem AFTER HE WAS DELIVERED up by the Sanhedrin.

Your position is completely unreasonable and without any logic at all because you have no corroborative evidence--no corroborative sources to support you but your own personal translation and interpretation of cherry-picked verses.

These are the facts.

1. An Apologetic source, the Muratorian Canon, place the Pauline writings AFTER Revelation by John or AFTER c 70 CE

2. The author of Acts writing some time AFTER c 70 CE or after gLuke was composed did NOT ever mention or claim Paul wrote Letters to Churches.

3. Up to c 180 CE or later Epistle Hebrews was unknown in Against Heresies.

4. No NT manuscripts of Epistle Hebrews have been found and dated to the 1st century.

5. Apologetic sources that used Epistle Hebrews also claimed Jesus was crucified on earth.

6. Chrysostom wrote Homilies on Hebrews and did NOT claim or argue that Jesus in Hebrews was never on earth.

7. In the Canon, Epistles that were supposedly composed After the Fall of the Temple do NOT mention the miracles of Jesus on earth--2nd Peter is considered a Late Epistle and has virtually nothing of the miracles and words of Jesus.

8. The claim or implication in Epistles Hebrews that Jesus was Sacrified for Remission of SINS is found in the LATER Gospel of John--but Nowhere in the early short gMark.

9. The theology in Epistle Hebrews is NOT found in the Gospels or any other Canonised book.

10. Apologetic sources that mentioned Epistle Hebrews are questionable and may themselves be forgeries or interpolated.

EarlDoherty

You never actually read my responses to you, do you, aa?

Earl Doherty

Sheshbazzar

I think you mean the one that got well cooked and canned.

jakejonesiv

Thank you. That wasn't so hard, was it?

Precisely. You are engaging in exegesis, not grammar. One can always disagree over that. No smoking gun.

You only heaped scorn when I made the two points above. What use further discussion? And your "apology," after H.Detering complained, contained two more knives in my back. You must have too many friends to thus treat someone who has defended you at length before. Do you need the links even in the archive of FRDB to refresh your memory?

It is.

No it doesn't because you are not making a Greek grammar argument any more.
Jake

EarlDoherty

The grammar argument was only one part of it. And exegesis is quite capable of entailing arguments and deductions based on logic. If I can demonstrate that my exegesis is logical and that a different exegesis is illogical, then I have proven a point. (Since it involves a contrafactual statement indicating that Jesus was never on earth, that is indeed a "smoking gun.") At least I have until sometime demonstrates the flaw in my logicality. This you have not yet done.

And in my apology I explained why I reacted in an insulting manner. Making that explanation was not a knife in the back. It was pointing out that you had a very deficient and amateur understanding of Hebrews and that your tone against me was thus not merited. That is fact, not ad hominem.

And where was the scorn in my latest response to your two points? There was none there. It was a simple answer to a simple question. You misinterpreted my point about Greek grammar alone governing my meaning of 8:4. Does calling attention to your mistake constitute scorn? How else am I going to answer your question?

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

Appendix 4
Dating Hebrews and the Authenticity of the Postscript
[page 214, 247, n.4]
__________________________________________________ ______

Scholars generally acknowledge the strong arguments for dating the Epistle to the Hebrews prior to the Jewish War of 66-70, although they often hedge their bets by claiming such arguments are not decisive. Because there is no mention in the epistle of the destruction of the Temple in the War, one would tend to assume that this event had not yet taken place. On the other hand, the counter-argument has been made that other documents known to post-date 70 speak of the Temple sacrifices in theory even though they are no longer performed. In these, however, there are significant differences from the case of Hebrews. The two most common examples appealed to are Josephus and 1 Clement. In the latter’s chapter 32, the writer says:

For it is from Jacob that all the priests and Levites who minister at God’s altar have since descended.

This is a passing comment in a context which has nothing to do with the Temple cult. The writer, in speaking about Jacob and God’s gifts in history, is stating a general principle in traditional Judaism. He would have had no special interest in pointing out that the Temple cult had ceased to be practiced. Similarly in chapter 40, ‘Clement’ is discussing cultic tradition; he is recounting “sacred lore” (v.1) and the Old Testament commands of God. Since he is using that lore as an illustration to his readers of how it is commendable to be obedient to the laws of God, he might well leave aside the observation that such obedience in regard to the Temple cult was no longer in effect.

Josephus, too, discusses Temple practice in an historical context, outlining the principles of the Old Testament cult (Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. III, ch. 6, 7, 9). In both these writers we may, in fact, be witnessing a use of the “historical present.” Moreover, neither of them had an interest in declaring the traditional cult, spoken of with a certain amount of pride, as dead and supplanted, whereas Hebrews very much did. Thus, this particular counter-argument has little force.

Indeed, it is almost beyond contention that Hebrews must be dated before the Jewish War and the destruction of the Temple. Hebrews’ entire theology is based on the new heavenly sacrifice of Christ supplanting the ancient sacrificial cult, in effect since Sinai. Some post-70 writers may have written of a Temple cult as though it still existed because they regarded it as a matter of time before it would be restored, or else they regarded it as existing within the ‘eternal’ validity of the Law. But this is not the outlook of the writer of Hebrews. For him (as for Paul), the Law was supplanted; its sacrificial cult was anything but eternal. He would have had neither wish nor expectation that the Temple be rebuilt, nor would he have thought that the old cult had any further relevance.

Quite the opposite. He knew that Christ’s heavenly sacrifice had sent the old cult and covenant into oblivion, and it would only be a matter of time before it passed from the world. He could not have said in 8:13, “he has made the first one [the Old Covenant] obsolete, and what is growing old and obsolete is near to disappearing,” if the Temple sacrifices had in fact disappeared. This would have been seen as a mark of the fulfillment of what was looked for and it would not have gone unmentioned in the epistle. The destruction of the Temple would have been compelling proof of his position, God seen as shoveling the old covenant and its cultic basis onto the garbage heap of history through the agency of the invading Romans. The writer’s focus may have been on the prototype sanctuary at Sinai (another counter-argument sometimes appealed to), but the continuance of that prototype in history and the present, which he occasionally refers to (as in 8:4), is also of import, and that is yet to pass away.

Another feature arguing for an early date is that the End-time, the anticipated arrival of the “completion of the ages” and Christ’s arrival from heaven with it, is still a vital idea, with no sign that there has been a delay which has become troublesome (as in 2 Peter). Furthermore, we can see from other documents (such as the Gospel of Mark as well as Jewish writings like 4 Ezra, both datable to the late 1st century) that the destruction of the Temple led to a conviction among sectarian groups that the End could be expected shortly. But even though the author and his community regard themselves as living in the final days, no point is made about an imminent End as a consequence of the fall of Jerusalem, which would tend not to place the epistle in the immediate post-war period. Dating it beyond that period becomes too problematic, and thus we may fairly confidently locate this document somewhere in the decade or two prior to the War. There is even the possibility that it could have been earlier, given the open-ended genesis of Christianity without an historical Jesus, and the witness of Paul to an existing cultic Christ movement before his conversion and the presence of several well developed pre-Pauline christological hymns in his letters.

A possible argument ruling out a late provenance for Hebrews is an apparent quoting from its first chapter in 1 Clement. In 36:1-6 one finds several cases of language in parallel with that in the first chapter of Hebrews. But this raises a separate question which is of some significance: is it in fact necessary to see 1 Clement as familiar with Hebrews itself? The author does not cite it by name, as he does the Pauline epistles elsewhere. Attridge has suggested (op.cit., p.6-7) that Hebrews’ author, in his scriptural citations in chapter 1, is drawing on an existing catena of biblical proof texts which may have served certain early Christian communities as demonstrating the exaltation of the Son in heaven. But if so, that collocation could be the source of 1 Clement’s own listing. Indeed, Clement’s different order may reflect the order of the catena, an order which the Hebrews author might have altered in the interests of fashioning a much larger argument. Even Clement’s reference to the comparison of the Son with the angels (and it has distinctive anomalies in wording from that of Hebrews) could conceivably be part of such a catena document, since it serves to make the point about the Son’s superior status in heaven, even if it is not a scriptural citation.

It is true that Clement in 36:1 refers to Christ as “high priest,” perhaps the strongest indicator of a knowledge of the Hebrews christology and the document itself. And yet, 1 Clement in its great length nowhere applies this idea of Jesus as high priest in the distinctive manner of Hebrews, a high priest conducting a heavenly sanctuary sacrifice. If he knew and subscribed to this document as a whole, it is certainly a matter for curiosity that he would not draw on or reflect some of its powerful and distinctive christology. Nor do we see any sign in 1 Clement of the negative attitude toward the Temple cult which is so prominent in Hebrews.

There is thus ample reason to doubt that 1 Clement is anywhere dependent on or even has knowledge of the Epistle to the Hebrews, but is merely drawing on common traditions and sources. This would preserve Hebrews’ independence and isolation from other cultic Christ expressions, something the document itself more than suggests. As for sharing the term “high priest” for Jesus, a designation found nowhere else in early Christian writings, 1 Clement might have derived it from other circles which have left no record; or it may have been a concept with some currency in Jewish intermediary Son philosophy, drawn on by the Hebrews community as well. Philo also refers to the Logos or first-born of God as a “high priest” (On Dreams 1.215, On Flight and Finding 108), though not with the same degree of personification as is found in Hebrews and 1 Clement.

Related issues are involved in the question of authenticity surrounding the final verses of this work.

Verses 20-21 constitute a benediction concluded by a doxology. Authenticity for these verses has been questioned, including in association with various amounts of the preceding text, sometimes encompassing the whole of chapter 13. It is uncertain that we need to go that far back, and few scholars do. But while verses 17-19 may seem a little out of character with the body of the work, that issue is not important here. The question of authenticity in the other direction, however, is definitely so. Verses 22-25 constitute what could be referred to as farewell greetings, something common at the end of the standard epistle:

22 I beseech you, brothers, bear with this word of exhortation, for I have only written you a few words. 23 Be informed that our brother Timothy has been released, and if he comes soon, I shall see you with him. 24 Greet all your leaders and all the saints. Those from Italy send their greetings. 25 Grace be with you all.

Harold Attridge (op.cit., p.384) is of the opinion that “There is no reason to doubt that they too [verses 20 to 25] were composed by the author of the whole work.” The fact of the matter is, where verses 22-25 are concerned, there are many reasons to doubt, quite apart from the fact that they have a completely different tone from what has come before. Attridge admits that they “serve an obvious epistolary function,” but they also serve other functions which stand at odds with the rest of the work. We can put the objections in point form.

1. This postscript starts out by saying, “…I have written only a few words.” Hebrews is only a little shorter than Romans, and one would hardly refer to Romans as “a few words.” The attempted explanations for this anomaly which seek to retain the postscript as authentic are forced and unconvincing, and need not be detailed here. It is perhaps best seen as a bit of shortsightedness on the part of the later postscript interpolator.

2. The mention of “Timothy” can scarcely refer to anyone other than the Pauline Timothy. Unlike Christians of the later 2nd century, modern scholars reject a Pauline authorship for the Epistle to the Hebrews. Thus, the postscript can only have been added by someone intent on making it sound as though the author was Paul. Another scholarly suggestion is that the actual author of the epistle did know Paul and Timothy, or even that he had Paul write this postscript for him as an addendum. Yet can we believe that the writer of Hebrews knew Paul or Timothy? This would mean that the writer moved in Pauline circles. (This is clearly the intended implication of everything in the postscript.) But Pauline circles believed, more or less, as Paul did; and yet there is nothing identifiably Pauline in the principal strands of the Hebrews thought-world. It in no way reflects the soteriological system put forward by Paul, let alone his mode of expression in describing the saving activity of Christ and the believers’ relationship to him; there is nothing like Paul’s “baptism into his death” or his language of being “in Christ.” Nor is there anything in Paul like Hebrews’ christology. This double-sided incompatibility casts strong doubt that the postscript, with its blatant Pauline atmosphere, can be the product of the author or of anyone closely associated with the author.

3. The language and style of the postscript strongly suggests that whoever wrote it is attempting to associate the document with Paul or the Pauline circle—quite probably Paul himself, since “our brother Timothy” echoes the way Paul speaks of Timothy in his letters (2 Cor. 1:1, Phil. 1). Moreover, it speaks of the newly-released Timothy as being with the speaker when he next sees the readers. This is clearly meant to suggest an association with Paul, who historically (we presume) was known to have been accompanied by Timothy on his missionary journeys. Timothy may further have been chosen because of the pseudonymous letters to him, indicating to the postscript writer that Timothy and Paul were closely associated, and this served his purpose of insinuating Pauline authorship of the document. If so, the fact that the Pastorals are 2nd century products might suggest that the postscript comes from that period as well.

4. We have a postscript but no superscript at the beginning. (Wilson [op.cit., p.17] makes a good case for rejecting the idea that there originally was one but it was deleted or lost.) If it was natural for the original author (or his secretary or some other associate) to add the typical epistolary ending, why not the typical epistolary opening? Especially if done at the time the letter was originally sent off when, to judge by the care taken in the writing of the document as a whole, sloppiness or oversight would hardly be likely. It is a later postscript writer who would be more likely to overlook putting on a salutation, or choose for some reason pertinent to his later time not to do so.

5. James Moffatt was quite honest in saying that attempts even in his day to identify the author of Hebrews as among the characters mentioned in the New Testament, were “in the main due to an irrepressible desire to construct NT romances” (International Critical Commentary, Hebrews, p.xx). He concluded:

The author of To the Hebrews cannot be identified with any figure known to us in the primitive Christian tradition. He left great prose to some little clan of early Christians, but who they were and who he was God alone only knows. To us he is a voice and no more. The theory which alone explains the conflicting traditions is that for a time the writing was circulated as an anonymous tract.

If this conclusion, based on the text itself, is indeed true, it is hardly likely that it could have done so with the postscript present. With an ending like that from the start, there would have been no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was the product of Paul, and the idea of anonymity would never have arisen.

6. Some commentators find no difficulty in suggesting that the “letter” was being sent off to some distant community to which the writer does not belong. The postscript itself, as noted, paints the picture of an author who is a traveling apostle. It also says, “Greet all your leaders,” as though their leaders are not the writer’s leaders, let alone that he is one of them. (On this score, we may have to bring in 13:17 as part of the addition, as it implies the same.) Yet this cannot be aligned with the tone and content of the rest of the document, which very much conveys the impression that the author is part of the community he is addressing, and that he has much contact and discussion with them. For example, 10:24-25 says: “Let us spur one another on to love and good deeds, not give up meeting together, as is the habit of some…” Clearly he is not some outsider, let alone a roving apostle who only infrequently visits and who has ties with other communities—in contradiction to the clear implication of the postscript. (This is another example of the sloppiness of the postscript interpolator, who was not perceptive enough to realize that his added verses could not be aligned with the content of the document itself.) Logic dictates, therefore, that the author of the postscript cannot be the author or an associate of the author of the epistle proper.

7. If the writer were an outsider, a traveling apostle or someone associated with the Pauline circle (which is what the postscript conveys), the identification of “the religion we profess” as one in which the High Priest Jesus performs a sacrifice in the heavenly sanctuary (see, e.g., 4:14) would mean that such a faith was something held by, and preached to, other communities as well by the person speaking in the postscript. But no christological system as put forward in Hebrews is to be found anywhere else, in any other document let alone in anything produced by Paul or the Pauline circle. Consequently, the postscript, being blatantly Pauline, is thoroughly at odds with the content of the epistle.

8. If the postscript cannot be associated with the writer or his community, the next logical Sitz im Leben for its addition would be an attempt to bring this lonely-child piece of writing into the fold and make it part of the Pauline corpus. This would have been the period when many isolated writings among those now found after Acts in the New Testament were being collected, assigned authors, and where necessary turned into epistles, since this was the preferred way to convey theological doctrine and other admonitory issues to the faithful. Such a time is the mid 2nd century and beyond, when the Roman Church was assembling and modifying documents of all sorts and casting them into a picture of a unified movement (just as Acts, written at that time, was also designed to do).

9. The final device, verse 24’s “The ones from Italy send you their greeting,” is perhaps a little too obvious, meant to explain how the Roman Church got this letter—it was sent to them! But this is belied by the epistle’s content, which is an admonition to the addressees by one of their own not to abandon their faith. This is incompatible with the postscript’s picture of a letter sent from one community to another, and would moreover require us to assume that at some point the Christian community in Rome was in danger of collapse.

Why is the issue of the authenticity of the postscript important? Because if it is a later addition, there is no need to see this particular document as having a close relationship to other circles or writers in the rest of the Christian record. (Just as it need not be the case that Hebrews was known to 1 Clement.) Without the postscript, the document fits into the picture of a Christ-belief movement which had no central organization or common doctrine, let alone a single point of origin. Hebrews’ prominent motifs of revelation and inspiration from scripture speak to a faith phenomenon which arose out of a background of widespread impulses that had no link at its beginning to any common founding figure. If an early dating is correct, scholars are right to wonder why, if Hebrews was written within the Apostolic Age itself, its presence or ideas have left no mark on the records of the primitive church. The answer is simple: there was no “primitive church” in the sense of a centrally based and generated organization, but only an array of sectarian expressions which drew on a common pool of concepts and influences. This isolation can be seen in Hebrews in the fact that there seems to be no interaction with any other group which has different views, no awareness of heresy, no contrary ‘spirits’ from God. In this, too, we see a lack of association with Pauline and other circles.

Earl Doherty

aa5874

I do not accept your imagination as evidence. What you imagine is really of little value.

In Theophilus "To Autolycus" comprising of 3 books there is ZERO mention of Jesus or that Jesus was sacrificied for the Sins of mankind.

You utterly fail to understand that there were Christians in the 2nd century who argued that the Sacrifice of human beings to God was Murder and not necessary.

Minucius Felix Athenagoras' "Plea to the Christians" GAINING KNOWLEDGE of God is the noblest Sacrifice according to Athenagoras.

What a load of BS. I am the one who have exposed that the Jesus story and cult originated in the 2nd century based on the ABUNDANCE of evidence from antiquity.

I am the one who have argued and shown that the short gMark Jesus story is the Foundation of Christianity--NOT Epistle Hebrews.

Not one author of the Canon emulated Epistle Hebrews but there are at least 3 AUTHORS of the NT that used virtually ALL of the short gMark sometimes word-for-word.

I do NOT claim at all that Athenagoras believed the Gospel story. Why can't you write exactly what I said??

Athenagoras wrote about the LOGOS as the Son of God and did NOT acknowledge any character called Jesus or Jesus Christ.

Athenagoras believed in GOD and did not accept Sacrifice to Gods.

Duvduv

Very likely simply because the Athenagoras text was not originally Christian, but was adopted by Christians!
Just like the original epistles except this text wasn't tampered with like the epistles. After all, who needed to reinvent the wheel from scratch? Especially befote texts were finalized as sacred writ akin to the Tanach.