Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

APPENDIX. 597
dpxatoi dvSpeg d)g UavXov avrrjv napaded^Kaai. All the following
Greek Church Fathers name the epistle as Paul's :
Eusehius places
it in his canon among the Pauline epistles (Euseb. iii. 25, see farther
on this below), in hke manner Antonius, Athanasius, Didymus,
Theophilus of Alexandria, the two Gregories, Basil, EpipJaanius,
James of Nisibis (in Galland. bibl. patr. tom. 5. p. 16 and
53), Ephraim of Syria, the two Cyrils, Chrysostom, etc.
Nevertheless, some have ventured to call in question the antiquity
and unanimity of this oriental tradition. Bleek (i. p. 108)
thinks that by the dpxaXoi dvSpeg to whom Origen refers might also
be meant merely Pantaenus and Clement of Alexandria ; not only,
however, is it improbable that Origen should have designated these
his immediate predecessors and teachers by so vague an expression,
but the usus linguae is directly against this. (For example, Eusebius
ii. 1, where he narrates the death of the Apostles, says : Koi
ravra [lev (hg t|' apxatoiv laroptag elpijadoj ; in iii. 24, he says, the
Gospel of John has had the fourth place assigned to it rightly by the
apxaloc.) Chiefly, however, is the context conclusive against that
interpretation. For Clement of Alexandria had 7iot unconditionally
held that Paul was the immediate author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
; how then can this Clement be brought forward among those
to whom those churches might appeal which held the epistle to be
directly Pauline ? The sense of the passage is plainly this : The
Alexandrians cannot, indeed, believe that this epistle, with this style,
was thus composed by Paul himself; but whosoever will yet hold Paul
to be the immediate and proper author (therefore in opposition to
Clement !) we can do nothing against him, since even the ancients
have handed down the epistle to us as one of Paul's."
And, accordingly, a second objection also is herewith refuted
(Bleek p. 107). In the words a rtg ovv iKK/irjaia tx^i TavTTjv rrjv
i-ntoToXriv o)g UavXov there evidently lies the presupposition, that
only a few churcJies at that time held the Epistle to the Hebrews
to be a work of Paul. But the question treated of in the context
of this passage is not at all whether the epistle was written by
Paul or came into existence without Paul having any thing to do
with it. That the ancient tradition imputed it to Paul was a settled
point, and only the certainty of this tradition could induce
Clement and Origen to form those two conjectures, by which the
un- Pauline style at variance loith the tradition might be explained.*
—The question with Origen is rather, whether the epistle, precisely
as we have it in Greek, can have come directly from Paul. The old
* How altogether untenable is the opinion of Bertholdt (Einleit. iv. 2914, seq.), that
the Alexandrines—those who observed and always so strongly urged the un-Pauline
character of the style—were the first who raised the conjecture of a Pauline authorship
and that "on exegetical grounds."