Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

586 APPENDIX.
sideration both of the import of the epistle as a whole, and of its
particular intimations. The import of the epistle as a whole leads,
as lias been already shewn, to the conclusion, that access to the temple
worship was either rendered difficult or altogether forbidden to
the readers. This circumstance, however, yields a pretty certain
terminus a quo, a point of time before which the epistle can certainly
not liave been written. We learn from Acts xxi. 28, 29 that
in May, 58, when Paul came to Jerusalem from his third mission
tourj the Jews charged him with having taken into the temple along
with him a Greek, an uncircumcised person, namely, the Gentile
Christian Trophimus, and thereby having profaned the holy place.
Now, whether this was an intentional pretext, or, as appears, from
ver. 29 {tvo^a^ov)^ a mere mistake, so much, at all events, may be
inferred from the nature of the accusation, as also chiefly from ver.
24, that at that time Jewish Christians, as circumcised and as native
Israelites, were not prohibited from going into the temple.
The Epistle to the Hebrews must therefore have been loritten after
the year 58, but it cannot have been written very soon after the
event recorded in Acts xxi. There must have been an interval
during which the hatred of the Jews against Christianity rose to a
degree considerably higher.
As the extreme terminus ad quern, the year QQ offers itself, which
was the first year of the Jewish war. That the Epistle to the Hebrews
was written before the destruction of Jerusalem appears not only
from those particular passages in which the Le^^tical ritual is spoken
of as still subsisting (chaj). ix, 8, x. 1), but, even if we had not those
passages, might be inferred, with undoubted certainty, from the import
and the practical aim of the epistle. We must evidently come
down a series of years from that extreme terminus ad quern; it is not
probable that the epistle was written immediately before the beginning
of the war, when the external fermentation and decomposition
of the Israelitish national life had already come to a height. The
circumstances presujiposed in the epistle resemble much more the
first beginning of that fermentation than its comi»lction.
Certain I'lyovntvoL had already, we know, suflered martyrdom
(chap. xiii. 7); the readers themselves, also, had already suflered loss
in their earthly possessions (chap. x.
34), and many of their fellowbelievers
had been imi)risoncd ; they themselves, however, had not
yet needed to strive even unto blood (chaji. xii. 4, comp. our remarks
on the passage). On the other hand, it is taken for granted ever}'-
where in the hortatory portions, that severer jjersecutions may come,
nay, will come ;
the readers are systematically prepared for these,
and exhorted to submit to the suflerings that were before them as a
discipline from (jlod (xii. 5, scq.), not to become fiiintheartcd (x. 38,
scfi.), to persevere in patience (x. 30), to imitate the faith of the