Messages From the Epistle of Hebrews

The following chapters are the work of intervals of leisure scattered
over a long time. The exposition had advanced some way when an
unexpected call to new and exacting duties compelled me to put it aside
for several years. Accordingly a certain difference of treatment in the
later chapters as compared with the earlier will probably be seen by
the reader, particularly a rather fuller detail in the exposition. But
purpose and plan are essentially the same throughout.

No attempt whatever is made, here or in the course of the work, to deal
with those literary and historical problems which so conspicuously
attach themselves to this Epistle. Who the "Hebrews" were is nowhere
discussed. Nor is any positive answer offered to a question to which
assuredly no such answer can be given, the question, namely, of the
authorship. In my opinion, in face of all that I have read to the
contrary, it still seems at least possible that the ultimate human
author was St. Paul. All, or very nearly all, the objections to his
name which the phenomena of the Epistle prim‚ facie present, and some
of which lie unquestionably deep, seem to be capable of a provisional
answer if we assume, what is so conceivable, that the Apostle committed
his message and its argument, on purpose, to a colleague so gifted,
mentally and by the Spirit, that he might be trusted to cast the work
into his own style. The well-known remark of Origen that only God knows
who "wrote" the Epistle appears to me to point (if we look at its
context) this way. Origen surely means by the "writer" what is meant in
Rom. xvi. 22. Only, on the hypothesis, the amanuensis of our Epistle
was, for a special purpose presumably, a Christian prophet in his own
right.