In my Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews I did not try to settle whether St. Paul wrote it. Having now looked at all the other letters ascribed to him, we might be better placed to pursue that question. But I still find it, as I did when studying the disputed letter itself, so secondary and unimportant that I do not wish to take it up at the close of a volume devoted to a far greater aim: showing the essential agreement of the first three Gospels, the Epistles of James and Peter, and all the letters we ascribe to Paul, with each other and with the principles unfolded in a book so unlike them all in form and style—the Epistle with which I began. I have wanted to show that the plainest Evangelist is setting forth the same Son of God and Son of Man who is the subject of Hebrews; that the Evangelists, like the writer of that Epistle, see Jesus’ acts as the fulfilment of the Old Testament—not because they matched particular predictions, but because they revealed Him who was implied in all the Jewish institutions, whom the Prophets had learned from those institutions to see already as the Mediator between God and man, the King, High Priest, and Prophet from whom all their own kings, priests, and prophets drew their functions and their light. I have wanted to show that the first three Evangelists, like the writer of Hebrews, saw their own time as the winding-up of an age to end in a great judgment, and expected that judgment to bring in another age, the revelation of the kingdom of heaven their Lord had spoken of; and that the Apostles of the circumcision, as well as Paul, speak of an apostasy likely to precede the end, one that would somehow affect the Church, the Jewish nation, and the heathen world.
But if these facts show the unity of all these New Testament writers—a unity from their common testimony to the Son of God and His kingdom—we have equally had to acknowledge their diversity. Each Evangelist saw his Lord under a particular aspect; James and Peter, though usually grouped together, each had his own character and function; and Paul was markedly different from both. It has been a chief concern of ours to find out what his distinctive principle and work were: how he came to seem at odds with the original twelve, and what connects his letters, though they are addressed to churches and persons so different, and each is plainly fitted to its readers. I have gladly taken help from the name the Church has always given him. He is emphatically, by his own declaration, the teacher of the Gentiles. But that name needs explaining. If we take it to mean that he thought little of his Jewish calling, gained nothing from his training under Gamaliel, or did not first invite Jews into the fold and call them to acknowledge the Son of David before turning to Greeks or Romans, both his acts and his writings refute us. Likewise I am grateful for the hint of our Protestant tradition that he above all is the teacher of Justification by Faith. The immense worth of that doctrine has become ever clearer to us in Romans and Galatians. But if we put any notion or dogma about Justification before the revelation of Jesus Christ, made of the seed of David according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection, then the meaning of Romans escaped us and his Gospel became a dead letter rather than the power of God unto salvation. And if, to make the Lutheran principle stand out, we overlooked the words in Galatians, “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles,” the whole purpose and coherence of that Epistle perished, and instead of defending Luther we drained his teaching of life. But if we take that passage as the key to Paul’s mind, we can understand that he was the Apostle of the Gentiles because he was the Apostle of Humanity; that he preached Justification because he testified that Christ, Son of God and Son of David, had justified Man by rising from the dead; that the baptized Church was the witness of this Justification, and that each person, by believing in the risen One, himself became a justified and righteous man. And so all his messages belong together: the mystery in Ephesians, hidden from ages but now revealed, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs of the same body; the mystery of Jesus Christ crucified, the wisdom and power of God and the living bond of human fellowship, announced to the Corinthians; the mystery of Christ’s resurrection, the goal of all his striving, as he told the Philippians; the mystery of Christ in us, the hope of glory, unfolded to the Colossians; the mystery of Christ’s unveiling as the judgment and deliverance of the world, set before the Thessalonians; the mystery of Christ the Mediator between God and man, the ransom for all, to be the subject of Timothy’s preaching; the mystery of God our Saviour’s kindness and love, by which Titus was to lift the Cretans from their debasement; the mystery of Christ the Brother of man, which broke the chains of Onesimus. All belong to the same Pauline message, and mark not only the same divine and universal Teacher but the same human agent.
If, then, those who deny that Paul wrote Hebrews rest their denial only on peculiarities of style they think impossible for the Jew of Tarsus, or on the weight of the Alexandrian fathers and the Western fathers who agreed with them, or on any external evidence whatever, I shall not argue with them—partly because I am nearly indifferent to the outcome, partly because I know how much our prior habits of mind sway us in weighing such arguments, and partly because I value their learning above my own. But if they argue this—that Paul, as Apostle of the Gentiles, was unlikely to write to the Hebrews, or that if he did he would surely dwell on the calling and privileges of the Gentiles—then I object. It is vital, in understanding Paul, to remember that he saw his calling to preach among the Gentiles as the carrying out of the promise to Abraham, that he adapted himself to every people he wrote to, and that his teaching about Christ as the Man who fulfils the promise that man should have dominion over all creatures, made a little lower than the angels to be crowned with glory and honour, is the characteristic doctrine of all his Epistles. Or if it is urged that Paul must have written formally about justification by faith and would not have spoken, as this Epistle does, of kings and priests and sabbath-days and the temple and the sacrifice, I protest that this objection rests on a theory that narrows and misrepresents the purpose of all his writings, and makes them useless for defending the very truth it tries to confine them to.
This is all I care to say about authorship. But I cannot close without noting those distinctive marks of this Epistle that are rightly held to be more prominent here than anywhere else. Although the idea of Sacrifice is present in every letter and every line of Paul we have read, nowhere is it developed as it is here. Though I have shown in my Lectures that it does not stand alone but is bound up with all the institutions of the Jewish nation, the common sense that it holds the central place among those institutions—and therefore in the book that expounds them—is the more justified the more we reflect on it. And though I have been careful to show that the Son of God and Son of Man of the first two chapters is the subject of the Epistle, as He is of all the New Testament, and that a doctrine of Sacrifice must not be put in His place here any more than a doctrine of Justification in Romans, it is plain that this Person is brought before us here especially in His twofold character of Priest and Sacrifice, His other characters not swallowed up but in some sense subordinate to these. Far from wishing to overlook this, I would earnestly point the reader to it. Whether or not Hebrews is Paul’s, it is needed, I think, to complete the circle of thought into which Paul leads us. It is needed to show us the deep common ground of those societies, each with its own purpose in God’s kingdom. It is needed that we may understand how each nation, and the particular Church that represented its character, was connected with that one Nation whose foundations were laid in God’s eternal and righteous Will and in man’s surrender of his will to it. It is needed to show how impossible it was for that nation’s calling to be fulfilled, or reconciled with other nations, until there was One who, an heir of David, could say in stooping to the death common to Jew and Gentile, “Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is written of me, to do thy will, O God”—One who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, that we, purged from dead works, might serve the living God. It was needed that we might know how a spiritual and universal order could rise out of the ruins of a legal and national one, and in time make each nation capable of institutions more truly divine, of a life more orderly and free, than the Hebrew ever knew. And it is needed, I think, so that we may connect the varied aspects of humanity we find in Paul with the profound and simple theology of the Apostle John, and with his vision of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven, as a bride adorned for her husband.