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Home , Epistle to the Hebrews

BIG TENT THE LETTERS TO THE AND FROM JAMES

What has the got to do with the New? Is the God of and ’s family and ’ Law and ’s conquests and ’s bloody- war-won kingdom and ’s prophecies – is that the same God who shows up in of Nazareth? have asked this question for all twenty of our centuries, and we have mostly answered, “Yes!” But for many that answer doesn’t come without a struggle.

In our reading, we’ve already encountered Matthew’s Jewish-Christian group living precariously in a Jewish-majority setting, continuing to keep the Sabbath and purity laws, looking to the prophets as guides to who Jesus is, and generally living out their lives within the contours. Now we turn to two authors who reflect on and write to the culture of early Jewish Christianity.

• The Letter to the Hebrews features a serious attempt to fit Jesus within the tradition of Israel’s priesthood. • The Letter of James reckons with the role of Moses’ law in the continuation of God’s covenant through early Christian communities. • In a couple weeks, the will give us a window to some Jewish Christian thinking and doing among the Seven Churches of the .

In this session, we’ll focus directly on the shape of Jewish Christianity in Hebrews and James. These letters give us an early window to Christians who understood Jesus as God’s next step with Israel. All Christianity began as Jewish Christianity – we sometimes forget that. Here are two authors who worked hard to understand what that meant. They can help us. Let’s read on!

THE LETTER TO THE HEBREWS: JOB ONE

In any book of the Bible, we ask very early, “What is this book trying to accomplish in its audience?” After a whole lot of theological probing of the Old Testament (see below extensively!), the author pushes the main issue: . Can they keep the faith they have. The Letter to the Hebrews brings us powerful passages that fortify faith. These may be the most famous words in the Letter to the Hebrews:

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (.1, KJV)

There follows a chapter filled with the great acts of faithful people throughout Jewish history, through which the author summons the strength of that historic community of saints – a sort of “Faith Hall of Fame” – to ground his encouragement in the community. Like everything in this book, as we shall see,

©Allen Hilton 1 Big Tent Bible even that testimony of the faithful heroes falls short of the culmination God has made in Jesus.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (.1-2, NIV)

Faith is central and the example of Jesus grounds faith. These powerful passages live right where you and I do, where our wants evidence and disciples want someone to follow.

Our author builds toward this climax in ways that he hopes will build the very faith that he outlines here.

Hebrews: The Non-Pauline Non-Letter to Non-Jews

The title of this writing. The most ancient manuscripts of the document we call Hebrews named it “The of Paul to the Hebrews.” Clever commentators have suggested that this may be inaccurate on all three counts.

The Epistle?

You and I have had our fill of Pauline letters. Each of those 13 letters begins with the word “Paul” and a formula that has now become normal for us:

o Author + Brief Characterization of Author o Audience + Brief Characterization of Audience o A Blessing (like “Grace to you and peace…”) o Thanksgiving and/or Prayer

To our newly-trained eyes, then, the “Letter of Paul to the Hebrews “looks very different – very un-letter-like. It’s first words sound more like a lecture or than a letter.

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.

These first words of Hebrews offer no hint at who wrote these words, to whom they were written, or what the relationship is between that author and that audience. These missing elements suggest that this is another kind of literature.

©Allen Hilton 2 Big Tent Bible It is only very late, in the last chapter, that Hebrews begins to look a bit like a letter. This has led interpreters to suggest that what we have in this book is a that then gets sent around as an attachment to a brief letter.

Of Paul?

Who wrote Hebrews? You and I have discovered that discerning authorship of Bible books is not an easy task. Many Old Testament books seem to have been created by committee; each of our arrived without a listed author; and even letters that name an author sometimes appear to have been written in the name of another. Finding an author for Hebrews is notoriously difficult.

• Paul? While some early manuscripts call this letter “Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews,” the Greek style is very different than Paul’s usual. In fact, from early Christian times people doubted that Paul had written it; • Priscilla? Because of the connection to Paul (some theological affinity and a mention of Timothy), some have named the prominent female co-worker of Paul whom Paul mentions a couple times and Acts features as a mission partner. A famous German New Testament scholar called Adolf Harnack suggested that it may be Priscilla. • Others? For reasons of Greek style, the brilliant church father, of Alexandria, considers the possibility that Clement of Rome or Luke (author of Luke and Acts) may be our author. He also considers the Apostle Paul, because Christian ancestors had suggested it.

In the end, even the very formidable Origen punts on the issue, when he throws his hands in the air: “Who wrote the epistle, in truth God knows.” (Quoted in , Church History 6.14.2)

To the Hebrews?

This author is most obviously Jewish. He channels the Hebrew scriptures ably and often. The clear number one goal of this author is to exalt Jesus of Nazareth and fortify his position in the minds of his audience. To do that, he accesses his formidable command of the Old Testament and Jewish tradition. The Hebrew Scriptures offer all of the major settings for his characterization of Jesus, beginning with the powerful first words:

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. 3 He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. (.1-3)

©Allen Hilton 3 Big Tent Bible Here our author places Jesus above all the different ways that God has spoken over all of time. Unlike the prophets, Jesus is “God’s son”, who not only escalates God’s level of communication, he embodies it – he who can both “understand our weaknesses” (.14-16) but “through whom God also created the world.” (Hebrews 1.2 above)

Angels

Angels appear prominently in the Book of Hebrews. That may seem like a nursery school move, given how angels have been treated in American culture. But angels appear a handful of time in the Old Testament, and that role grows within Jewish tradition about how God moves in the centuries surrounding Jesus’ arrival in Palestine.

o In Psalm 8, God has made humanity “a little lower than the angels.” o Angels are crucial in the spectacular scene when God calls Isaiah to prophesy to Israel. (ch. 6) o The 10 (written in 165 B.C. or so) features a being in dazzling white, and the tradition runs with that. o Rabbis in this period came to believe that angels were crucial in God’s delivery of the 10 Commandments to Moses. As one NT scholar has put it, “The presence of angels at the event of the giving of the law was a favourite bit of embroidery in rabbinic tradition, and was meant to enhance the glory of Sinai” (H. Schoeps, Paul, 182). o The “heavenly hosts” at the nativity of Jesus (Luke 2) probably reflects a developing hierarchy of angels as the rabbis understood it. Angels are messengers or functionaries of God – mediators between God and the activities of humans.

The great American evangelist, Billy Graham, wrote a book about angels late in his life, with the subtitle “God’s Secret Agents.” That is indeed how they function in scripture. But the author to of Hebrews puts angels in a prominent place at the beginning of the book, largely to establish or accentuate Jesus’ superiority to that whole realm of heavenly beings.

o Unlike humans, who are slightly inferior to angels in Psalm 8, “Jesus has become so much better than the angels, as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." (Hebrews 1:4) o “Let the angels of God worship him (Jesus). (Hebrews 1.6) o "Are [angels] not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for those who will inherit salvation?" (:5)

In his one late nod toward angels as “God’s Secret Agents”, this author uses angels in a splendid other way that recalls Abraham and Sarah’s audience with angels in Genesis 18. The congregation to whom Hebrews is written must

©Allen Hilton 4 Big Tent Bible o “always show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so, some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

Do angels play a role in the way you think about God? If so, what are they up to?

What is Jesus’ rank in your world?

High Priest

Jobs used to stay in the family. My father is a mason or baker or lawyer, so I’m a mason or baker or lawyer, and so on. Inheriting the family business goes back and broad in human culture. We even think of Jesus, son of Joe the carpenter, as a carpenter.

This was certainly true of the priesthood. From Exodus onward, the priests of Israel come exclusively from the tribe of . That all makes the job of our author to the Hebrews a bit difficult when he nominates Jesus as the Great – this Jesus, whose carpenter daddy hailed, not from the tribe of Levi, but from the tribe of (David’s tribe).

Nonetheless, there our author is nominating Jesus anyway.

Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the , let us hold fast to our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. 16 Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4.14-16)

Audience

All of this intricate navigation through the Old Testament tells us that the author is almost certainly Jewish. But scholars disagree on whether the audience is also Jewish. Is our author addressing Jews who need persuading? Or are they Gentiles who haven’t quite caught on – even though they know enough about Jewish tradition for the author to take them on this wild ride.

What we know about the audience is that they have a strange side-by-side: they are probably being (or have recently been) persecuted for their faith. This is so

©Allen Hilton 5 Big Tent Bible clearly put that some scholars believe it was written during Nero’s reign in the empire’s capital. Here’s how Hebrews puts it:

“you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, 33 sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. 34 For you had compassion for those who were in prison, and you cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting. (10.32- 34)

However, those persecutions, which might have increased their urgency, happened “in earlier days” (10.32), and by the time of this writing, the audience has grown a bit lax. The author must coax them to church:

And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching. (10.24-25)

American Christians who consider themselves devout and committed attend church an average of 1.3 times per month. That’s pretty close to 25% attendance. Any chance .24-25 might be relevant to our generation?

The Relevant, Irrelevant Book of Hebrews

The splendid, soaring passages about faith (11.1) and Jesus as our example (12.1-2) are surrounded by less animating scripture. We quickly run into things that feel archaic and obscure. Here is one scholar’s description of that disconnect.

Few documents of the NT appear, at first glance, to be as removed from the world of the modern reader as the Epistle to the Hebrews. Written in an elegantly polished Greek, it makes puns on Greek terms and names, advances an extensive argument about the nature of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ based on an allegorical reading of the fixtures and furniture of the Old Testament , and argues for the superior priesthood of Jesus by comparing him to the mysterious figure Melchizadek, who makes but a cameo appearance in the Old Testament. If these exegetical techniques and theological arguments could once be used persuasively to encourage Christians to persevere in their commitment, they could scarcely serve that purpose for most Christian readers today. Most contemporary readers of Hebrews neither speak nor read Greek, nor do they care for rather esoteric Old Testament details, such as what stood behind the second curtain of the tabernacle (9.3-4) or the significance of Abraham’s

©Allen Hilton 6 Big Tent Bible tithe paid to Melchizadek (7.1-6). But if the rhetorical flourishes and literary style of Hebrews do not generate an empathetic response, its fundamental description of Christian believers as a pilgrim people with a sure guide in Jesus Christ and a definite goal in the heavenly city, in need of faith for the journey they undertake, rings true in every generation where discouragement and distractions threaten such faithfulness. (Achtemeier, Green, and Thompson, Introducing the New Testament: Its Literature and Theology)

I couldn’t have said it better myself! Even as people who have passed swiftly through the Old Testament together, Hebrews may seem to fix on minutia. It is a brilliant interpretation of a literary world in which you and I don’t spend much of our lives or thought.

Hebrews is both utterly relevant and apparently irrelevant. But in it we find an anchor to the only Bible Jesus had. By interpreting Jesus through the sacrificial system of our Old Testament, the author rewards the reading we’ve done in the and shows us how a first-century Jew might have processed the mystery of how God became human and how the cross saves us.

That’s enough for Hebrews.

©Allen Hilton 7 Big Tent Bible An Early Stab at Building a Christian Bible

Marcion was a mid-2nd-century Christian from Pontus in the middle of what we call Turkey today. Marcion is the first Jesus person in the history of Christianity we know to have proposed jettisoning the Old Testament. He called the God he found there “the demiurge” and saw him as morally inferior, so he left the Old Testament out. He also left out the of Peter and John, as well as Revelation. In fact, he even exacto-knifed out the more Old-Testament-ish parts of the one he favored, Luke. Many have been tempted to follow his lead and give up on the God of the Old Testament. Hebtrews and James do not!

Marcion’s “Bible” Our Bible

No Old Testament 39 Books of the Old Testament

Marcion’s Gospel (Mostly Luke) The Gospel according to Matthew The Gospel according to Mark The Gospel according to Luke The Gospel according to John

No Book of Acts The

The Letter to the Galatians The Letter to the Romans The First Letter to the Corinthians The First Letter to the Corinthians The Second Letter to the Corinthians The Second Letter to the Corinthians The Letter to the Romans The Letter to the Galatians The First Letter to the Thessalonians The Letter to the Ephesians The Second Letter to the Thessalonians The Letter to the Philippians The Letter to the Laodiceans The Letter to the Colossians The Letter to the Colossians The First Letter to the Thessalonians The Letter to the Philippians The First Letter to the Thessalonians The Letter to Philemon The First Letter to Timothy The Second Letter to Timothy The Letter to Titus The Letter to Philemon

The Letter to the Hebrews The Letter of James The First Letter of Peter The Second Letter of Peter The First Letter of John The Second Letter of John The Third Letter of John The Letter of Jude The Book of Revelation

©Allen Hilton 8 Big Tent Bible

THE LETTER OF JAMES

James, the brother of Jesus, led the earliest church in . Acts tells us that he made the final decision on important matters, like the conditions for Gentile inclusion into the churches. (Acts 15) Paul tells us that the resurrected Jesus appeared to James. (1 Corinthians 15) He also lets us in on his own skirmish with Christians James sent to Antioch, who tempted Peter away from table fellowship with Gentiles. (Galatians 2) James was an influential person in early Christianity, and he continues to help us across the ages through a practical letter of guidance he wrote to Jewish Christian brothers and sisters he called “the twelve tribes who are disbursed abroad.” (.1)

Christian history has both loved and hated James and his letter. My own journey with this letter plays out that same ambivalence. Here’s how James has fared in three stages of my own life.

Phase One: Practice Makes Perfect

James is a letter of action. Don’t hunt here for high theology and Christological nuance. But if you want to learn wise ways of living Christianly, James is your man. When I first became a Christian at age fifteen, I wanted to know what I should do, so my friend Joe Hoover guided me to James. In fact, the first Bible verse I ever memorized is James 1.22: “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” (NASB) We started The Doers Club with this as our charter scripture. Further in, we found music to an activist adolescent’s ears:

What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself. (.14-16)

James also supplied help when our classmates looked askance at our Christianity. We were teased for adjusting our language and not swearing. Some people left us off their party lists because we didn’t drink. During a game, the left-fielder on my summer baseball team sang Billy Joel out loud to me as I stood in center: “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. Sinners are much more fun.” He sang those lines again. Then James said, “Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” (James 1.2) I memorized this verse because I needed it. In fact, it was because of this kind of counsel and assurance that, later in college, I memorized the whole letter. I needed the whole thing.

©Allen Hilton 9 Big Tent Bible Joe and I didn’t have time for heady claims about religion. We needed real, practical help. James made perfect sense to us. We (somewhat self- righteously) demanded lived proof: you are what you do. Joe and I gravitated to James, because it was simple guidance for two boys navigating the mysterious maze of our teenage years in Christ.

Phase Two: A Right Strawy Epistle

Over time, I changed my tune about James. My high school self liked the simplicity of instructions: do what God says. In later years, though, the living of life and a growing sense of my own failure to live all the way up to Jesus’ way had me looking for reassurance that God wasn’t keeping score. James had said, “Not the hearers of the Law are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be justified.” But what if I mess up? What if I don’t measure up? When I got to seminary I began to read the letters of Paul and get his point. “No one is justified by works of the Law!” seemed true. “We are justified by grace, through faith” came as good news to me. I needed to know that God loved me – that I couldn’t lose that love, even if I sinned. Paul became my guy. James went on my B list.

In this new phase, I learned that James almost didn’t survive the . In the revolutionary spirit of the sixteenth-century Christianity, Martin Luther and the others who contended with the medieval Roman Catholic Church put everything on the table for discussion. In that context, Luther himself wrote, “Therefore St. James's epistle is really a right strawy epistle, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.” (Luther’s Works, 35.362)

Phase Three: A Big-Tent, Both/And Bible

Can you imagine Paul and James in the same room? “By works!” “By faith!” “By works!” “By faith!” Tension! Dinner conversation would be uncomfortable. But my third phase with the Letter of James brings them into conversation all the time. These days I’ve come to appreciate how wise God is to give us both Paul and James in the same Bible. You and I need to hear the high demand of God’s righteousness on our lives. And you and I need to hear the soothing reassurance of grace when we don’t quite meet that demand.

Are you a James person or a Paul person? Have you had your own phases? Christians through the ages have chosen up sides. We see the James people on one battle line and the Paul people on the other. The “Works People” here, the “Grace People” there. Lately I wonder why we must choose. Paul and James debate in me all the time, and I am glad to have them both along for the ride of life. They give me two complementary ways of understanding God and myself. Their disagreement helps me. Does it help you?

Siblings of the Savior

©Allen Hilton 10 Big Tent Bible The James we’re talking about here is not John’s brother, the co-son of Zebedee from .16-20, etc.) He was the brother of Jesus himself. Did you know Jesus had brothers and sisters? The tells how the people of Nazareth scoffed at Jesus by saying he’s just a hometown boy:

They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offense at him.” (Mark 6.3)

I wish we knew the sisters’ names! Later in the New Testament, Paul calls James Jesus’ brother too, (Galatians 1.19) so it seems an open and shut case.

So why haven’t you heard more about the Savior’s siblings? In the centuries after the New Testament Gospels, some Christian leaders reasoned that Mary needed to have given birth to only one child, in order to stay perpetually a virgin and therefore pure. It was the way they set Mary apart as God-honored and unique. But of course it made the rest of the family problematic.

Bible readers began to read Mark 6.3 in terms we have come to call fictive kinship – the way Christians call one another brother and sister because of shared belief, rather than shared biological descent. That reading was built to fit the belief about Mary. But historians almost all agree that Jesus had flesh-and- blood biological brothers and sisters. And historians agree that James was one of them.

What’s Next?

We haven’t run into Peter for a while. He was central among Jesus’ disciples. Then he failed Jesus catastrophically when he denied Jesus three times on Maundy Thursday. John’s Gospel shows him sprinting to the empty tomb, and Acts had him preaching on Pentecost. Now we pick up Peter again. The two letters with his name on them are next. Let’s read on!

©Allen Hilton 11 Big Tent Bible