Fr. Stephen: We’ll go ahead and get started; when we get started in just a moment, we’ll be picking up at the beginning of chapter two of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, and we’ve been – well, we went through chapter one, and previous to that we had the long introduction which, by the time people are hearing this recording they’ll be able to go back and listen to that recording. But for today, the main things we saw as we went through chapter one was, first and foremost, we emphasized – you saw the technique that’s being used here in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, that it doesn’t follow the same format as St. Paul’s epistles, and that this is why, of course, so many people, beginning with the Church Fathers, have questioned whether St. Paul himself wrote it – at least, wrote it in the same sense. But we also talked about how the argument is made, including by me, that there’s a genre difference here, that this isn’t really an epistle in the sense of this being first and foremost a letter; this is actually more like a homily or a sermon that’s been sent somewhere. So, it’s been sent the way a letter would be sent, but it’s actually, in its genre and in its shape, in its structure, it’s more like a sermon or a homily – specifically a sermon or a homily on Psalm 110 or 109 in the Greek numbering, if you’re looking at it in the Orthodox Study Bible or somewhere else that follows the Greek numbering.

And so, the emphasis in the first chapter in terms of the content – we saw that format that we talked about, how this was done within Second-Temple Jewish circles in the first century, where even through you’re preaching about one text, you’ll also introduce other texts. You’ll draw on texts from other places and bring them in parallel, to reflect how you should interpret the particular one that you’re focusing on, rather than just breaking down the grammar, or… [laughter] this and that. That you want to bring in other concepts from elsewhere in the Scripture so that scripture is interpreting scripture, rather than scriptures are interpreting themselves. And so, we saw that there are a whole pile of other passages in the first chapter.

And the main focus in terms of the content was talking about Christ as God the Son, and then distinguishing him from the other beings, particularly the angels in this case, who are referred to as “sons of God” in the Old Testament. So, how is Christ different than the angels? And there were two ways that were focused on; one was focused on more than the other. One of them was that we saw that the Son is described as being eternal: he was there at the beginning; God created all things through him, meaning he would have created the angels through him and for him, whereas he is not spoken of as being created or being something else “through and for” – for some purpose for which he came into being, because he’s not described as coming into being.

But the bigger focus was actually on Christ being different than and superior to the angels because the Son is human. And specifically, the Messiah, that he was from the line of David. That he was the reality behind the promises made to David. And so, just in chapter one of Hebrews we got most of the contents of the seven Ecumenical Councils [laughter] and their dogmatic decision. We got the Trinity—at least, we got the Father and the Son relationship – Christ is the Son—and we got Christ’s incarnation. We got both that he is eternal God and that he is man; he’s the Son of God, he’s the son of David, the Messiah. We got all that laid out real quickly [snapping fingers]; took us a lot longer to talk about it than to read it in Hebrews chapter one.

And so, as we’ve talked about many times before, these chapter and verse breaks are very late additions. So, we tend to – we’re so used to them; these were just added for convenience; most of them – a lot of the chapter breaks go back to the twelfth century, not all of them but a lot of them, but the exact chapter and verse breaks we have now only go back to the middle of the sixteenth century in one of the – Robert Stephanus’s early Greek New Testament printings.

And so, even though we’ve known them our whole lives, and they make it easy to point to a particular verse and refer to a particular verse—that’s why he added them—we have to be careful never to insert them into our interpretation. It becomes very easy to – “Oh, there’s a chapter break here,” it’s convenient me to have a place to stop in a given Bible study, after a certain amount of time, but we shouldn’t act like, “Oh, okay, so chapter one is about this, and chapter two is about that,” and structure it in our heads around the chapter numbers, because sometimes they put a chapter number there because they detected a shift in topic or something. But as we’ve seen as we’ve been going through, sometimes we look at where they’ve put a chapter break and it’s just like, “Why? Why on earth would you put it there?” So, don’t read too much into that.

So, all that is to say, really, because this is a homily or a sermon, there weren’t commercial breaks; there weren’t pauses where these chapter breaks are; it was just one continuous argument. So, we have to keep in our heads that, even though obviously we’re not going all through Hebrews in one sitting because we’d all die from lack of water and food [laughter], that this was presented at some point in one sitting. In one continuous – this was one continuous argument. So, really, we’re continuing right from where we were before; this isn’t sort of, now, bullet point two. Episode two.

So, with that said, unless there are any other questions, comments… interesting journal articles somebody read about something – we’ll pick up in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter two, verse one.

“Therefore” – there’s a “therefore.” [laughter] So, “therefore,” this is referring to – this is what I meant: we’ve got to keep in mind what we just read. “…we must give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest we drift away.” Verse 2: “For if the word spoken through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just reward, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed to us by those who heard Him.”

So, he is setting up here a parallel, a comparison. He starts out by saying, “Therefore”; [paraphrasing:] “Because of everything we’ve just said about the way in which the Son—the way in which God the Son, the way in which Christ—is superior to the angels, we have to…” [directly quoting:] “give them more earnest heed” – [paraphrasing:] “we need to be even more dedicated, lest we drift away.” And “for” there is “because,” and so then he makes this comparison. So, on the one hand, you have “the word spoken through angels which proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just reward.” What’s that referring to? Believe it or not, that’s referring to the Torah. That’s referring to the Torah.

Interlocutor 1: I was just wondering when, if ever, transgression and disobedience received its just reward.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, this verse is one of many that creates a problem for some of our Protestant friends, because you can go back, forth, and sideways through the Torah itself—through Exodus and the giving of the Law; through Deuteronomy and the second laying out of the Law—and you will not find anywhere where it talks about angels being involved. In fact, if anything, you find some things that sound like they would contradict that. For example, you read in Exodus about Moses speaking to God face-to-face. This makes it sound like there are intermediaries.

But, even though, if we’re just going – if we go by, alone, the text of Exodus, you won’t get this, the text of Exodus that St. Paul read and received, and everyone else in the first century read and received, they received within a context. They didn’t just walk into a room one day and find a Torah scroll sitting there—“Oh, what’s this?”—and read it. And just go from that. The Torah scroll—they’re super-expensive—the Torah scroll was at your local synagogue. And you didn’t read it, because most people weren’t literate. At least, at first—no one was reading it at first, when they were small children—they’re hearing it. They’re going to the synagogue and they’re hearing it read, and they’re hearing it explained. And they’re hearing it taught. By teachers, in the synagogue. And so, there are ways of interpreting it and ways of understanding it and ways of understanding the story that get handed down from generation to generation in the synagogues, in the context in which it’s being taught and being expressed.

And one of those things is not really additional information. So, this tradition we’re talking about is not a bunch of additional information. The Pharisees had additional information, in the sense that they had additional rules, and those get codified later in Rabbinic Judaism, centuries later, as what they call the “Oral Torah,” that’s this additional stuff. And we find Christ critiquing the early version of that additional stuff when he’s going back and forth with the Pharisees and pointing out how some of their additional stuff contradicts the stuff that’s there in print. In writing. Not in print yet, but in writing. But that’s not, as some of our friends would want to read it, Christ putting down the idea of tradition as such. He’s talking about particular ones that they’ve come up with, that contradict; that are coming from outside; that aren’t from God. So, they’re receiving it from this tradition.

And part of that tradition was not, again, additional information about how the Law was given to Moses, but it was a way of understanding what’s happening when the Law is given to Moses. And it’s a way of drawing together what’s in the Scriptures, and what surrounds the Scriptures, and the things that the Scriptures themselves are pointing to.

So, what do I mean by, “what the Scriptures are pointing to”? I’ll give an example (that will seem unrelated at first). Way back in the long-ago time – there are so many young people around now, and I feel so old. But when the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ, came out, one of the ways that some folks, including some Orthodox folks, criticized that movie—and I’m not saying the movie’s above criticism—but one of the ways it was criticized was that people would say, “Oh, it’s so gory. And so bloody. Depicting Christ’s beating and Crucifixion and all of these things.” And they would want to contrast that with, “Well, you look at the Gospel accounts—you look at Ss. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and their accounts just, y’know, ‘He was taken away and crucified.’ It doesn’t go into all that gory detail. It doesn’t do all that.”

The response to that, though – on the surface, that would seem like, “Well, yeah, that is very different. What is with this weird obsession with all the blood and the gore?” But the original readers, first-century Jewish readers who were reading the Gospel, had seen people crucified.  It was a means of public humiliation and execution. So, they had seen the blood and the gore. They knew what that meant, to get scourged by the Romans. They had seen it happen to people. They knew how bloody and gory – so you didn’t have to describe it all to them; you just had to say, “He was taken away and crucified,” and they would know how horrible that was. So, they could just give a very spare description, and everybody knew what they were talking about.

Now, I, at least – there are people in the world who have seen someone crucified, unfortunately. There are places where horrible things have happened and people have seen horrible, gory things, and those people, you don’t need to lay out details and, like, re-traumatize them. They know what it’s about. But for people like me who have lived a relatively sheltered life in that respect—I haven’t seen someone murdered; I haven’t seen someone beaten to death; I haven’t seen these things; God has spared me having to see those things—I need the more detailed description to really understand what this is about. Because it’s not part of my experience.

So, in the same way, in lots of places in the Old Testament, things are referred to and alluded to that, if you were someone in the ancient Near East, if you were someone in ancient Israel, or even from a culture surrounding ancient Israel, or, later, Judea and their surroundings – there are things that are alluded to, like pagan stories that are alluded to, or ways of seeing things, ways of understanding the world and reality, that, at the time, everybody knew and you could just refer to casually. The book of Jonah can just refer casually to “the pillars of the earth.” And everyone at the time knew what that meant. And you could just make a reference to one of the stories of Ba’al, or something, in the Prophet Elijah’s contest with Ba’al, and everybody knew who Ba’al was in the ancient world; he was the god of one of the major powers at the time, the Phoenicians. So, you could just allude to these things.

But we, now, in modern times – I dare say—correct me if I’m wrong—no one in this room has read the Ba’al cycle.

Interlocutor 1: No.

Fr. Stephen: [laughter] I can safely say none of you have read it in Ugaritic. So, you might read one of those – and I think most of us have read a whole bunch of stories that involve Ba’al in the Old Testament, and Psalms, and stuff, that are alluding to those things, and not even realized it. Had no idea what it was talking about because we’ve never read it. We don’t have that context. So, one of the main things tradition does is it preserves that original context. It preserves those things surrounding it so that you can read it properly later on.

And so, this is what’s happening here with this “Law being given by angels” thing. See? I got back there eventually. That’s what’s happening. Because the way in which the giving of the Law is described in—and we’ll see more of this as we go through Hebrews—the way this is described in Exodus – so, in Exodus, in the original description, the way it is described would have put certain images and certain ideas in the minds of the original readers and hearers. And so, when they read about the construction of the Tabernacle and its shape, they would have understood certain things. When they see Moses going up on the mountain, into the cloud, they would understand certain things. When he’s standing and talking to God face-to-face, they would’ve had an understanding of what that means. To them. And that understanding is not necessarily immediately shared by us as modern American people reading it.

So, what they understood is that, first of all, Mt. Sinai, when God came to rest there – first of all, that him coming to rest there meant that he was enthroned there. We don’t necessarily read that. In fact, most people who have read Genesis 1:1-2:2, which is the story of creation, when God “rests” on the seventh day, have pictured that as him taking a break.

Interlocutor 1: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: Like he just worked hard all week, and so, TGIF. And so, he decides to take a break. They haven’t understood “rest” there to mean what it’d originally mean, which was, “He sat down on his throne.” That he’s enthroned at the end of that story. To rule over what he’s now created. So, they understood, when God comes to rest on Mt. Sinai, that means he’s now enthroned there, which means that’s now the mountain of God. It’s not always the mountain of God; later on, the mountain of God is Mt. Zion, once the Temple’s built there. Because that’s the place where God has come to rest, meaning that’s the place where he’s come to be enthroned.

I don’t want to digress too much on, but there’s also constant arguments and ink spilled about where Mt. Sinai historically was; I’m willing to argue that in different parts of the Bible, two or three different mountains—physical mountains—are Mt. Sinai. Right now, St. Catherine’s is at Mt. Sinai. That’s the mountain that’s currently being Mt. Sinai. But the mountain of God is where God is, is the mountain where he is, and that’s not identified – it is identified at various times with particular mountains that you can go to and visit, but it’s not confined to that. There were Greek people who walked up to the top of Mt. Olympus and saw that there weren’t any gods hanging out there. We tend to think that ancient people were really stupid. It’s our default. They were just as smart as us; many of them were smarter. It was more subtle than that. They understood that the mountain they pointed to—or Mt. Zaphon with Ba’al—that those became the mountain of God, or of the gods, at certain times, for certain purposes, in certain ways.

But so, God is enthroned on Sinai when he’s going to give the Torah to Moses, and that “throne” language actually comes up, if you read closely, in Exodus, when the Amalekites attack the Israelites. God says that His judgement is going to be against them because they’ve dared to “lay a hand upon the throne of Yahweh.” So, that “throne” language even pops up. So, he’s enthroned there, and if he’s enthroned there, that means one of the other words, probably the second-most-common term for mountain of God, in the Old Testament, is the mount of assembly, which is “har mo’ed” or, if you want to be fancy, if you’re really fancy lad about how you pronounce Biblical Hebrew, it’s “har moched” [sic; incorrectly glossing ‘ayin to chet]. There you go [laughter]. And you may have heard from that pronunciation, that’s what gets called “Armageddon” in the book of Revelation, but we’ll get there. It’s not Megiddo.

Anyway, har mo’ed, the mountain of assembly – “har” is the Hebrew word for mountain, and “mo’ed” is assembly. And that’s also the term that the pagans used for those mountains. For them it was, “This is where the council of the gods – we’ve got one god who’s the king of the gods, and then you’ve got the other gods, who assemble there” – Mt. Olympus, Mt. Zaphon for the Ba’al worshippers. But that term gets used in the Old Testament, but it’s the place where Yahweh, the God of Israel, is enthroned, and then assembled around him are the angels, the angelic beings. We see a scene like this at the beginning of the book of Job. God sits, and he’s got the angels on his right hand and on his left hand, and they’re gathered in the assembly. So, that means this is now the mountain of assembly, this is the place of meeting, and Moses is invited to come up into that assembly. Into what they would call, in a pagan context, the council of the gods. Actually, the Old Testament calls it that, but we don’t because people get squeamish, so we call it the “divine council” [whispering] (which means the same thing, but–). [laughter] With the angelic beings: the cherubim, the seraphim.

And we see that scene over and over again: in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel. This is sort of the mark of a Prophet later on; it’s actually put forth that way in the book of Jeremiah. The person who’s a Prophet is the person who has been invited to come and stand in that council. So, when Moses is there talking to God face-to-face, if we have preserved, traditionally, this vision of it, then we understand that he’s there in the council with the angels. And so, it’s delivered to him by the angels. And this is dramatized – probably the most prominent piece of Second-Temple Jewish literature that dramatizes this is what’s called the book of Jubilees, which is probably the most important extra-canonical Old Testament book that nobody ever reads. And I say that because First Enoch is probably more important, but people read that. Nobody reads the book of Jubilees. Unless you’re one of our Ethiopian friends, for whom it’s part of their Old Testament, so they do read it sometimes. I don’t even think they read it a lot, though. But they do read it sometimes.

And the book of Jubilees is basically, in a written form, a lot of these traditions. A lot of these traditional understandings; a lot of this context. And so, when Josephus writes his history of the Jewish people, he’s cribbing from the book of Jubilees. And he treats the book of Jubilees like it’s a historical document. Like, “Oh, this is additional historical information besides the text of the Torah itself, that’s filling in blanks.” So, he very much treats it in this context way. And this is Josephus, in the first century A.D., treating it that way. That’s how they understood it. But it dramatizes this, and it has, in particular, the Angel of the Presence, who is the Angel of Yahweh, the Angel of the Lord figure. But we’ll talk more about that another time. But that gets connected to the Son of Man in Daniel, the way Hebrews has been talking about God the Son. But so, we see this idea, that Moses is there in this divine council with the angels when he receives the Torah, and that the Torah is therefore sort of received through this council, through these angels, even though it’s nowhere in the Old Testament explicitly. It was so well preserved as context by the time you get to the first century A.D., that St. Stephen refers to it in the sermon he gives before he’s stoned to death—he talks about Moses having received the Law through angels—it’s here in Hebrews, and St. Peter makes a reference to it. So, this is one of those things that everybody knew. Like we talked about – the most recent one other one of these we talked about was Jannes and Jambres, when St. Paul wrote to Timothy about it; everybody knew that was the name of the Pharaoh’s magicians. “Jannes and Jambres, that’s their names.” Because it’s been preserved as part of this larger context.

So, this is our first example. He’s talking about the Torah; he’s talking about how, everyone understood, Moses goes up, stands before God’s throne in the council, receives, through the angels, the Torah. And the Torah ends – the end of the book of Deuteronomy has what? Deuteronomy 28-30, it’s, “Today I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose.” And it lays out: “If you walk in my ways, you keep the commandments I have given you, here’s all the blessings you’ll receive; here’s all the good things that will happen. Your crops will be fertile; you’ll have sons and daughters, and grandchildren, and live long in the land I’m giving you, et cetera, et cetera.” And then, the other side: “If you do not walk in my ways, if you do not keep my commandments, and you go after other gods, and you do all these other things, then the sky will become like iron and the earth will become like bronze.” Which is bad if you’re a farmer. “And all of these things will happen, and you’ll end up getting exiled from the land, and the foreign nations will conquer you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” So, there’s these blessings and curses.

And so, that’s what’s being referred to here, in this example. So, we had the Torah, before, the Old Covenant. It’s given through angels. And there’s these blessings and curses attached to it, and if you transgress it, you’re going to receive the curses. So, this was a serious thing. Well, then, if we’ve established that Christ, that God the Son, is greater than the angels, then “how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed to us by those who heard Him.” This is coming from God himself. Not through angels, but through those who heard – through the Apostles. Through the Apostles. Now, notice, he’s put the Apostles in the place of the angels, which we do all the time and may not notice. When we say, “Their sound has gone out into all the world and their words to the ends of the universe,” which is the prokeimenon, and shows up several other places, every time feast of the Apostles in general, or of any of the Apostles in particular, if you go back to the Psalm that that verse is from, it’s talking about the stars in the sky. It’s talking about the angels. And so, it’s comparing the Apostles to the angels. And that’s what’s happening here.

But because Christ is greater, then neglecting the salvation that comes from Christ, neglecting the New Covenant, therefore has a far worse – imagine what those curses are like. But that’s the flip side of “imagine what those blessings are like.” The blessings are so much greater, the salvation offered is so much greater, than anything offered by the Torah, which, as we’ve talked about many times before, was sort of this sin-management system to get Israel through to Christ’s coming. And if that carried these sanctions, then if we neglect this, this is going to be even worse.

I do need to comment, in verse 3. So, one of the arguments made by the people who want to say, “St. Paul’s not behind this,” is that, “Oh, see, he says ‘we’ ” – “first spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed to us”—to we, to us—“by those who heard Him,” and they say, “Well, St. Paul never says he received anything from the Apostles; he always says he got the Gospel straight from Christ himself. So, two things on that. Number one, that’s not, strictly speaking, true. Remember First Corinthians: when St. Paul talks about the Eucharist, he says, “I passed on to you what I also received, that Christ, on the day–.” What’s he talking about there? He’s talking about, he received how to celebrate the Eucharist from the people who were there with Christ when Christ did it. So, St. Paul very much does talk exactly this way in one of his – nobody contests that St. – nobody; the wildest liberal in the world doesn’t think St. Paul didn’t write First Corinthians. Uncontested. So, St. Paul does speak this way.

But also, that’s missing this parallel that’s being made between the Apostles and the angels, which is the point of them being mentioned here. A normal person, reading this or hearing this in a normal context, would not be struck in that verse by, “Oh, this person is saying that they received the Gospel second-hand.” That is not what’s being said at all. There’s a contrast being made between the Torah being received through angels and then the New Covenant being received through Christ and the Apostles. That’s the parallel that’s being made.

Interlocutor 1: Doesn’t Paul think himself as an Apostle–

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Interlocutor 1:…and therefore, “we” and “us” would’ve referred to himself among the Apostles?

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, because the way this is phrased is, “confirmed to us by those who heard Him.” So, they would say that, “See, the writer is lumping himself in with the hearers, as people who received it from the Apostles.” That’s their argument. But my point is, that’s not what he’s doing. That’s very clearly not what he’s talking about in this passage. He’s making a parallel; he’s holding two things up in parallel; he’s not defending or denying his own Apostleship in this section.

So, this is a bugbear of scholarship—I’ve got a PhD so I can say this—… One of the signs of particular forms of mental illness is that you ascribe to things – you sort of fetishize things; you ascribe to things an undue pertinence and meaning that isn’t really there. So, you see a sign, or you see a color, or you see a number, and you go off on what sounds like a conspiracy theory. “This is a sign that x, y, z, dah-dah-dah…” And even though that is one of the signs of several forms of mental illness, that’s also something that scholars do all the time.

Interlocutor 1: [laughter] True.

Fr. Stephen: You can attest also. And if you stare at Greek grammar of a particular verse enough you start to lose all sight of context; you start to lose sight of how language works, that when people talk and they say a sentence, they usually only mean one thing; they don’t mean all of the possible ways you could interpret that sentence by itself. I’m just meaning one thing. And if you did that in normal, real life – like, if I suddenly said, “Oh, I need to go, I’m not feeling well,” and you sat and said, [in an ironically pensive tone] “He needed to go, he’s not feeling well… What does it mean to not feel well? He needed to go. He didn’t just want to go, it wasn’t just his decision, he was compelled to go…” and you started to– everyone would look at you like you were a crazy person.



Interlocutor 1: Isn’t this what happens some of the time, that I say something, and somebody misinterprets what I’ve said. they’ve heard the words, and the words could mean what they said, but that’s what I mean so I correct them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but this is even more pathological because–

Interlocutor 1: Yeah, oh yeah, this is the–

Fr. Stephen: …you’re sitting there, deliberately dwelling on it, trying to draw– everyone would look at you like a crazy person; they’d be like, “No, he– he just– he wasn’t feeling good, so he left.” [laughter] Y’know. It just means what it says, it just means what it means. And so, you get a lot of that – if you have somebody who’s a New Testament scholar, the New Testament is not that big. It’s not that long. And if you spend years of your life staring at it in the original Greek, you very quickly start drawing things out that aren’t there in that same kind of way, that are kind of detached from reality. And so, there always has to be this interpretive check of, “Well, wait. What is the author talking about right now? Does the way I want to apply this or understand this have anything to do with what he’s actually talking about?” This may seem obvious, but we’ve seen places. Right? We’ve seen places. I’ll go ahead and pick on our Calvinist friends again. We’ve seen places where a word like “election” gets used, and all of a sudden it doesn’t matter what St. Paul was talking about, what his topic is. He used the word “elect” and so now we’re off into this whole theological thing, which he can’t possibly, possibly—y’know, if you stop for a second and look at the context—he can’t possibly have been talking about that. It would make no sense. It would be the bizarrest digression ever. Romans 9 being exhibit A. He’s talking about why so many of the Judean people have not accepted Jesus as their Messiah, and then decides to talk about, “Oh, by the way, God picked people, before he created the world, to go to heaven and hell.” Okay, I’ll stop picking on Calvinists.

But you get a little bit of that here. So, someone comes to Hebrews, and they’re not trying to read and understand Hebrews. They’re not trying to get – at least at this moment. They may in other moments, but in this moment, they’re not looking at that, they’re not looking at, “What is St. Paul–” or, “What is the author saying?” They’re definitely not saying, “What is God trying to say to me right now through Hebrews?” They’re definitely not doing that. But they’re approaching it like, “Who wrote Hebrews?” That’s the question in their brain. “Who wrote Hebrews? I’m looking for pieces of evidence that St. Paul wrote it, or [that] he didn’t write it.” And so, when you come to this verse, you don’t ask, “What’s he talking about?” “How does this verse fit with the verse before it and the verse after it?” You just say, “Aha! In this verse, he says ‘us’ about the people who heard the Apostles; St. Paul wouldn’t do that! Add it to my list of proofs that St. Paul didn’t write it. I’m going to publish my journal article.” That’s the approach.

And so, the problem is with that approach. You’re trying to mine information out of the Bible that isn’t there. And the reason I’m taking the time for this digression is, this is the main thing that leads to people coming up with oddball Bible interpretations, and it starts a lot of arguments that you don’t have to start. We were talking about this before, but there is nothing in Genesis that is trying to tell you how old the earth is. There just isn’t. There’s not a place. It would be very easy, if it was. There could just be a verse saying, “This is how old the earth is.” [laughter] That’s really easy. Or you could approach Genesis and say, “I’m going to figure out from Genesis how old the earth is.” And then you come up with one date, and then you read the Greek version and you come up with another date, and then you read the Dead Sea Scrolls and there’s some slightly different numbers and you come up with another date, and then you can all argue about it for the rest of eternity. And you haven’t actually gotten into anything of what Genesis was actually trying to tell you about God creating the world, because you went in with a question you wanted answered.

And over and over again. “I’m really mad that the Pope is selling indulgences to pay for this building project in Rome, and so I’m going to comb through Galatians to try and find places that will tell me that this is wrong, so I can go and hold a public debate, and win against the Cardinal the Pope sends to argue with me.” [laughter] Wrong approach. St. Paul was not talking about anything sixteenth-century Popes were doing. He didn’t know there would be sixteenth-century Popes at the time he wrote it. I mean, he knew later because he was still around; He’s a Saint. But at the time that’s not what he was writing about, and so if you ask the wrong questions, you’re going to get the wrong answers. And so, that’s what’s happening here.

And the only reason I took the time to do that here is because any time I mention St. Paul writing Hebrews, this is usually the first thing people mention if they’re one of the people who likes to argue about who wrote Hebrews. So, it was pertinent here. But this applies generally; this applies to everything in the Scriptures. We have to come to the Scriptures wanting to learn from the Scriptures what the Scriptures can teach us. And that’s not irrelevant to our current time and place, and the debates we’re having and the struggles we’re in, and all those things. The Scriptures have something to say to us about all those things. The Scriptures are written for us, but they aren’t written to us. St. Paul didn’t know I was going to exist; he didn’t know what an “America” was… [laughter] He had no concept of politics equivalent to ours; he had no concept of any of these things equivalent to ours. He’s writing about something in his time and his place, to people he knows, usually, and now we want to understand how that applies to our situation and what we can learn from it as we address the situations in our own time and place.

And so, what St. Paul is doing here is making this parallel analogy between the way the Torah was received and the way the New Covenant in Christ is received.