Epistle to the Hebrews

Light iron-age reading The Bible

Gabbin' with God

Old / New Testament Apocrypha Annotated Bible

Analysis

Documentary hypothesis Genealogy of Jesus Evidence against a recent creation

Woo

Speaking in tongues Gematria The Drama of the Lost Disciples

Figures

Joseph of Arimathea Mary (mother of Jesus) Mary Magdalene v - t - e

Not to be confused with Gospel of the Hebrews

The Epistle to the Hebrews is one of the books in the New Testament. The primary purpose of this Epistle is to exhort Christians to persevere in the face of persecution. Its content mostly revolves around the doctrine of the Person of Christ and his role as mediator between God and humanity. Because it is written in much better Greek than most of the New Testament there is dispute over its authorship.

Authorship

Its author is not known and there is no mention in the text; it is traditionally attributed to St Paul of Tarsus despite being completely different from any of his other epistles, and this attribution is largely based on a guess by the authors of the King James Version although a few earlier writers had guessed likewise. Other proposed candidates include Pope Clement I, Barnabas, Luke the Evangelist, and two of Paul's associates, Apollos and Priscilla. If it was by Priscilla, that would be neat as it would be one of the very few Biblical writings by a woman, but the author uses masculine gender to talk of themself which is problematic for that guess.

Conservapedia suggests it was a sermon given by the actual Jesus on the Road to Emmaus. Mainstream scholarship based on textual clues dates it to 63 or 64 CE and does not agree with the illustrious writers of the right-wing encyclopedia; it's implausible that Jesus would have had such a nice prose style unless he was actually God (and even then, the other parts of the Bible supposedly written by God are hardly known for their concision, comprehensibility, or consistency). But apparently it's a sign of "liberal denial" to believe anybody other than Jesus wrote it.

See also

• RationalWiki Annotated Bible on Hebrews
• Hebrew, for the language of the actual Hebrews