(Heb 5:7–10), and not to forfeit their covenantal birthright as did Esau. For they are come to Mount Zion itself (12:22) and nothing but the conclusion remains (12:25–29).
Hebrews is the great retelling of Israel’s entire story now successfully summed up and concluded in the career of the Son, in whose footsteps we walk with the support of our enthroned, empathetic high priest and on the basis of the covenant concluded in his blood once for all. The path before us is, however, God’s Way that must be travelled to the end or everything is forfeited.
By locating us so thoroughly in heaven’s drama is Hebrews so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly good? It has certainly not received its due from earthly-minded historians of early Christianity frustrated by its indifference to their project. It has admittedly appealed to the philosophically-minded speculators of theology. There is, however, every reason to expect that its original readers grasped its point for their lives on their Roman streets. Its call to “go . . . outside” (13:13) had nothing to do with escapism but would take them right into the hurly burly of their cities. We may suspect that those of its readers through the centuries who have found strong encouragement in its teaching have been of the same ilk. No doubt they have found here, too, strong meat in the way this gospel robs the usurping powers of the shrine and basilica of their authority by ushering the person of faith straight into God’s presence on the power of Jesus’ atonement alone, by identifying their brother Jesus as the sole mediator in this matter, and by locating their citizenship foursquare in the promised inheritance. Truly the one who had the power of death was broken, and with that all the instruments by which he ruled their lives are made useless.
The Preacher and the Philosopher
As we continue to look into and through Hebrews’ vision, it is helpful to observe what could be considered the mode of thought represented in Hebrews. What is the relation of Hebrews’ author to his cognitive environment? In what ways does this thinker share in the thought patterns of his own context? A comprehensive treatment of such questions would take us on book-length detours, so we will limit ourselves to a particular parallel that has exercised a strong influence on interpreters.
Partly because of the uncertainty over author, readers, location, and timing, the question of how Hebrews relates to its environment’s thought worlds has garnered much attention. Such questions have always mattered, but moderns have a peculiar interest in such things. In part, however, Hebrews’ contents thrust the question upon us. Its language carries numerous parallels with (among other texts) the first-century Alexandrian Jew, Philo (c. 20 bc–ad 50), who wedded his Jewish traditions with Plato’s thought and read the OT in an allegorical fashion. For him, this involved among other things a strong metaphysical dualism that correlated the “heavenly” with the eternal, stable, unchanging realm of ideas, and the “earthly” with what is inferior, secondary, shadowy, and transient. A range of theories posit some sort of connection between Hebrews and the pattern of thought represented in Philo and related thinkers, while a range of alternative theories contend against anything more than parallels of expression that substantially differ in meaning. The view of this commentary is closer to the latter end. Covenantal, apocalyptic, historical patterns bound to christological convictions are what are expressed in Hebrews through wording that sometimes reminds of the Alexandrian’s writings (e.g., 8:5; 9:9–10, 23–24; 10:1; 11:3, 8–16; 12:27). Hebrews’ conceptions themselves are at bottom one with Paul, Peter, and Revelation, though of course the teachings and emphases are distinctive. Our commentary will explain further what this means.
One important part of this conversation relates to how Hebrews interprets the OT. Is he reading “allegorically”?12
There is a range of ways of reading “allegorically” and not all are objectionable (admitting that “objectionable” reflects the standpoint generally represented in this introduction and commentary). The more objectionable form dissolves both history and literature in a strong ideological mixture, a form not absent in Philo. Isolated events, persons, and phrases become symbols in their own right so that alien thought structures can be “discovered” in the “code,” as if they had always been there. For this approach, if a divine, all-knowing voice is behind the text, all the better.
By way of illustration, Philo approvingly describes the reading approach of a group known as the Therapeutae:
And these explanations of the sacred scriptures are delivered by mystic expressions in allegories, for the whole of the law appears to these men to resemble a living animal, and its express commandments seem to be the body, and the invisible meaning concealed under and lying beneath the plain words resembles the soul, in which the rational soul begins most excellently to contemplate what belongs to itself, as in a mirror, beholding in these very words the exceeding beauty of the sentiments, and unfolding and explaining the symbols, and bringing the secret meaning naked to the light to all who are able by the light of a slight intimation to perceive what is unseen by what is visible. (Philo, Contempl., 78 [Colson, LCL])
When, over the church’s history, strains of this reading strategy pushed their way from the periphery to the center there was eventually a reaction, particularly among the Reformers and their heirs. In retrospect we would say that the gospel itself would not tolerate that type of allegorical reading because that strategy did not agree with the nature of the Scriptures, not merely that there had been underlying philosophical shifts reshaping the interpretive dispositions of the Reformers. Yet, even since that time at least pockets of the church have preserved the sounder instincts that tend toward the “allegorical” and that explain why it developed and held sway as long as it did. There was a baby in the bath water.
The preacher of Hebrews was no allegorist in the objectional manner just described, as was Philo. Yet a challenge to saying this consists in that the objectional reading strategy just described bears a resemblance to something different and necessary, not unlike the resemblance of Pharaoh’s magicians to Moses. In part, the difference goes to truth claims. Has God in fact spoken in the Son who is Jesus or not? Is Jesus properly addressed as God or not? Is this in fact the same God who spoke to Abraham and through Moses, and is he faithful and true? For the larger part, Hebrews takes such questions as answered, given its audience and the situation. But when such questions are answered they carry with them convictions—assumed more than expressed—of the nature of God’s speech through all history. Among other things, the gospel’s answers to such questions require us to take history and history’s narrative with full seriousness. This is not because there is a pre-conceived theory of history or of literature and such. No, the cause of this stems from the fact and nature of the incarnation, the fact and nature of the Son’s own history. In short, we learn from the incarnational form of his self-revelation how God has spoken and submit all our reading and interpretation to that knowledge, which is then necessarily mindful of literature (not merely words) and history in its seamless, organic whole from beginning to end. But for the very same reason it recognizes that the whole of that history and its literature depends on its being bound up with the Son, who is its origin, who bears it along and cleanses it, and who is heir of all things. These tendencies—respecting history, narrative, literature, on the one hand, and reading christocentrically (not merely christotelically), on the other—are not in competition but are mutually dependent. If history is not the history of Christ then it has lost its only possible center (because he is the actual center) and all flies apart. Only individual scholars with their personal theories can posit coherence, but their theories are merely opinion and are rightly received as such. But when the text of canonical speech is read “christocentrically” we are all the more committed to reading it in the light of history and literature and indeed all that properly belongs to the human experience.
It is in this tension, rightly balanced and preserved, that Hebrews’ argument works from beginning to end, giving us a touchstone for all proper reading of the Scriptures. There are a variety of ways in which particulars of Hebrews’ exposition will come close to or even touch Philo (at least in externals), just as will be the case with other Jewish voices of antiquity
