Fr. Stephen: Tonight, we are beginning St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews – I’ll go ahead and say it. Most of tonight is going to be introduction, especially because this is Hebrews and there’s a lot to talk about in terms of this book because, as I just implied—I referred to it as St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews—but there’s a whole lot of people, including a bunch of Church Fathers, who don’t think St. Paul wrote it, it’s not really an Epistle, and we’re not even sure it was written per se to a group of Hebrews, but more on each of those later. It’s sort of like the Holy Roman Empire thing in Voltaire. We’ll be discussing that tonight here as we introduce.

We’ll start with the “St. Paul” part. The Epistle has always been known as St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, even by people who didn’t think St. Paul wrote it. It was firmly established very early on. To give you an idea of how early on, we’ve talked before about how, when we’re talking about what an “original text” would be for the New Testament and how that doesn’t actually exist, the books of the Bible not only had a process of writing where in the case of, for example we’ll stick with St. Paul’s epistles, St. Paul dictated them; he didn’t write them by hand. We know that because we have those places in different epistles where he says, “See I am writing with my own hand,” and in a couple places, “See with what large letters,” clearly indicating that’s a change from the rest of the letter we’ve just been reading, that was written by someone else. And that was done by a sort of secretary that was called an amanuensis in Greek, and the way it worked is that the person dictating the letter would dictate it, the secretary or scribe would write down what was said but would also correct grammar, put it in good, polished literary form, because spoken and written in any language are a little different in terms of how you do it – polish it up a little, make it nice. And then, once they were done writing it, they would give it back to the person who dictated it to go over it and look at all those little changes and make any corrections they wanted to make. And then the person who was the scribe would take the letter to the recipient and read it aloud, wherever it was, and be expected to be able to answer questions about it. So that’s how an epistle was written – one of the individual epistles.

But we also talked about how, in some cases like Second Corinthians, what we now call Second Corinthians actually has the contents of at least two of St. Paul’s epistles edited together into it. St. Paul wrote at least four and maybe six epistles to the Church in Corinth, and we have the contents of at least two of them put together in Second Corinthians, and you can kind of see the breaks where they’ve been edited together. But then beyond that, we talked about how the books of the Bible did not circulate individually for very long. They of course did at first, when they were first written. St. Paul wrote the epistles at different times; the Gospels were written at different times by different authors; the general epistles that we’re about to get into—James; First and Second Peter; Jude; First, Second, Third John—likewise; Revelation, likewise. But very quickly they started to be gathered together into collections and the first one of those was St. Paul’s Epistles. We know that they were all gathered together in one place by 100 A.D. but that may have started happening even earlier.

Evidence of that is, for example, in Second Peter, where St. Peter refers to St. Paul’s Epistles; he says, “St. Paul wrote to you,” the people he’s writing to, but then he also refers to “St. Paul’s Epistles,” plural, meaning whoever he was writing to would have been familiar with more than one of them. Meaning they had to be circulating. So, they were probably already starting to be gathered together for circulation. But they were all collected by A.D. 100, and all of the manuscripts we currently possess of any of St. Paul’s epistles—manuscripts meaning handwritten copies—all of the copies we currently have, going all the way back, are all copies of collections of St. Paul’s epistles. We don’t have a single manuscript that’s from an individual epistle that was circulating by itself. So, by 100 A.D. they’re circulating as a collection; by the time in the second century when we have any manuscripts, they’re only circulating as a collection.

The earliest one we have of St. Paul’s epistles is called P46 – the P is for papyrus. Most of our later manuscripts are on vellum, which is animal skin, but the earliest ones we have are on papyrus, which is primitive paper. It’s bashed-out reeds to make what’s basically paper. Those are mostly found in Egypt, and then a few in parts of the Judean desert if you take into account the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, and that’s because the climate is so dry that papyrus like that could be preserved for this long, because, as you can imagine, anything paper-related is not going to last two-thousand years, is going to rot if there’s any moisture at all, as we well know in Louisiana. But if you’re in the Egyptian desert, there’s no moisture, and so you’re able to preserve paper much longer. So, the P – it’s P46 because it’s on papyrus and it’s the forty-sixth papyrus Biblical manuscript that they’ve found; they just number them in the order that they find them. And so, P46 is a manuscript of St. Paul’s epistles; it’s mostly complete in the sense that we have parts of all the books; it is not mostly complete in the sense that there aren’t holes in the pages and that kind of thing, which you always get with parchment manuscripts, but we have identifiable fragments so we can tell what the contents are. And we can tell that it dates to the second half of the second century, so somewhere between 150 and 200. That’s the earliest manuscript of St. Paul’s Epistles we have, P46, and it includes St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews.

And unlike the order in which the books are in our New Testament today, it is not here tacked onto the end of St. Paul’s epistles. That was done later because of people’s doubts about who wrote it. In P46 it’s between Romans and First Corinthians because they’re in order by length, like we’ve talked about, and it is the second-longest after Romans. So, whoever – whatever scribe copied P46 may have been copying the order from even earlier, but whoever originally gathered them and put them in that order was treating Hebrews just like the rest of St. Paul’s epistles. That person did not see any reason why it was different than the others or should be in a different collection. We also have from around 150 A.D. the general epistles—James; First, Second Peter; First, Second, Third John; Jude—start circulating together. The general or catholic epistles start circulating together in collections. Hebrews is never in it. So, the testimony of the manuscripts is that the scribes who were copying these things and passing them down thought it belonged in the “St. Paul” collection, not in the “other Apostolic writings” collection, when there were two. So, from that you already glean, well, this is why we’re going to call it “St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews”; that’s why it’s going to be titled that.

It’s also important to know that Hebrews was primarily being read authoritatively in churches. I’ll digress on this a little bit. We’re used to hearing this kind of misrepresentation of how canon works, how they decided which books were quote-unquote “in the Bible.” And it’s a misrepresentation in a ton of ways, like, nobody ever voted – they never got together and voted; they didn’t say anything about the New Testament Canon at the Council of Nicaea at all; there’s a whole bunch of misnomers floating around about that, that people think. But the biggest misnomer is this idea that people were looking at different books and trying to decide if they were canonical or not. “Canon” – what it means for a work to be canonical, and this is used outside of the context of the Bible; people will talk about the Western Canon of literature. The term “British Canon” is used to refer to music, mostly pop music of the mid-to-late 20th century. And so, “canon” just refers to works that exercise authority and prominence of place within a given culture or community. You can use it in all kinds of things.

So, when we’re talking about the Canon for the Church, we’re talking about these early Christian communities that grew up in these different places of the Roman world and even outside the Roman world, in Persia and other places. They had texts that they were reading liturgically from the beginning. So, when St. Paul’s going into synagogues, they’re opening up the scrolls and they’re reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, and he’s preaching from them, and he’s preaching about Christ. And so, we see already by—I’ll reference Second Peter again—St. Peter lumps in St. Paul’s epistles with “the other scriptures.” So, even by that time, we’re talking about the mid-60’s A.D., in the first century, it was seen that these writings by the Apostles were of a similar authority and were exercising that kind of authority in these communities. So, any given community had texts that they were reading in their liturgical services and that they were preaching from. So, it was impossible in that context to be a member of one of those communities and say, “Is this book canonical?” because, well, “Do we read it in the services?” “Yes.” “Well, then, yeah.” If the answer is, “No,” then, “Well, not for us.”

And Christianity inherited from the various forms of Judaism, the different “Judaisms” that are going around at the time; the different forms of Judaism all had different canons. They all had different books they were reading. Qumran, in terms of number of copies we’ve found of books in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, so this is a non-Christian Jewish group that ended its life in the first century A.D. – in number of copies, so these would be the books that they were using the most, because they had the most copies: Number one, Genesis. Number two, the Book of Enoch, or First Enoch. Number three, Jubilees. Number four, Exodus. [laughter] So, they had a very different concept of what books were authoritative than the Pharisees did. And as we may know from other stuff we’ve talked about in the New Testament, their view of what books were authoritative was very different from the Sadducees, who only accepted the Torah as authoritative. And you go to Alexandria, Egypt, and they had First, Second, and Third Maccabees that they were using. And you go the Ethiopian Jews at that time, and they had a huge volume of literature.

So that was true in these Jewish communities, and so, the Christian communities that rose out of those Jewish communities and then had other non-Jews join them took over whatever they got from the Jewish community as their Old Testament, for the most part. And then they added in the Apostolic writings as their New Testament. But among those different Judaisms they didn’t sit around and argue about which books were canonical. We don’t even see the Pharisees and Sadducees arguing about that. They argue about other stuff; they argue about the Resurrection, they argue about theology and how to interpret the Law. They don’t argue about what books are canonical. You didn’t have anybody going to the Ethiopian Jews, like, “Why are you reading this weird stuff?” It was just like, “Oh, well, that’s their way.” And so, the churches basically do the same thing. They’re not sitting there, going out and condemning. We’ve got these Gnostic gospels, Gnostic writings, other non-canonical, other heretical literature floating around. And what you see is those communities, starting with St. Irenaeus, in Against Heresies in the second century, he doesn’t come out and just go after the books: “They’re reading the wrong books.” He goes after what they’re teaching. He says, “This community is not descended from the Apostles. They’re teaching this; that’s not what the Apostles taught. They’re teaching this; that’s not what the Apostles taught. They’re teaching this; that’s not what the Apostles taught.” And then he may add at the end that they’re getting it from these goofy books.

But none of these people are Sola Scriptura, and so none of these communities are based on the books they’re reading. The books generally are a function of what they believe. If you take a copy of the Gospel of Truth or the Gospel of Thomas in the early third century and you walk into a Christian community gathering with it, and show it to them, they’re going to read it and they’re going to say, “That’s not what we believe. That’s not what we teach.” They were judging the books by what they received, not vice-versa. They weren’t judging “what should we be teaching?” based on the books, because they had this living memory, going back to the Apostles, of what was being taught and what the Gospel was and who Christ was.

So, all that is to say, they weren’t fighting against each other; they weren’t in these debates, like, “We’re going to excommunicate you if you don’t accept Second Peter.” It happened organically. These communities, as they grow, and during times when persecution abated, would start to make contact with each other, and so they would see similarities and differences. And they’d be exposed to different books. So, there were communities that didn’t have Second and Third John. They didn’t think Second and Third John were heretical, and they threw them out; they never saw them before. And so, they encountered another community that had them, and then there was a process—part of the “getting to know you process”—they would then adopt Second and Third John.

So, that happens over a gradual process, and at any given point in time, what’s canonical and what isn’t is a very objective thing because–

Interlocutor 1: Do you mean subjective?

Fr. Stephen: No, objective. You could walk into any of those communities and there are certain texts that are being treated as authoritative. That’s the canon. You don’t need a table of contents; you don’t need a list. So, for example, the first time we get an actual canon list for the New Testament that matches our current New Testament is St. Athanasius, near the end of the fourth century, in 387 in his Paschal Letter. But even that is not, “Here I am as Patriarch of Alexandria, laying out the authoritative—” because, first of all, he couldn’t do that for the whole Church, because one Bishop can’t do that – sorry, Rome. But also, he isn’t even saying, “these are the books that are inspired by God; this is the canon—”; he says, “I don’t want any books other than these being read in my churches.” So, if there was some church out somewhere, or some monastery out in the desert in Egypt that wasn’t reading Second Peter, he wasn’t like, “You need to add Second Peter to your lectionary right now or you’re a heretic!” He’s saying, “If you’re reading something else—if you’re reading the Gospel of Thomas, if you’re reading the Gospel of Judas, if you’re reading…—I’m telling you to stop reading those things. Only the stuff on this list should you be reading.” And it doesn’t have an Old Testament list, it’s just New Testament books.



So, canon forms in a very different way. And I say all that here in this context because Hebrews is pretty much unknown in the West until the fourth century, and it’s not really fully embraced—and what I mean by “fully embraced” is where people start quoting it authoritatively and commenting on it in the writings of the Fathers—until the beginning of the fifth century, and it’s mostly St. Augustine and St. Jerome who start using it. And this is a digression I won’t go down right now, but I’ll just seed it here that that’s why you don’t have anyone talking about the Atonement in the West before, because, as we’re going to see, a big chunk of Hebrews is talking about Christ and the Day of Atonement. You don’t see anything about Atonement going on in the West during that period. But the Eastern churches start talking about Hebrews right from the beginning. You see it being quoted authoritatively, you see it being commented on, you see it showing up all over the place and just being treated as a writing of St. Paul.

So, there are some books of the New Testament like the four Gospels, by 150, were universally accepted as, “these are the Gospels, and just these four,” which is kind of amazing – I don’t want to digress too much on this, but it’s kind of amazing not that they excluded the other stuff, because if you read Gnostic gospels they’re very different. People say John’s different than the synoptics, but compared to the Gospel of Thomas, they’re identical. But interesting that it’s four, that we don’t see—we have no evidence of—major Christian Churches just using one of the four. You’d think, maybe this region would be using Matthew, and this region would be using Mark, and this one would be using Luke, and then over time as they got to know each other they’d start using each other’s, but that’s not how it happens at all. The four of them are there in tandem, all together, from the beginning. It’s an interesting and amazing phenomenon. But, again, it’s a digression; we’re talking about Hebrews.

But there are some New Testament books like that that just get accepted universally very early, throughout the Christian Church. There are other texts like Revelation that it takes forever. Revelation wasn’t really functioning canonically in the whole Western church until the fifth century, and the Eastern churches until the sixth century. And Hebrews is kind of that way in the West, but not the East. The East was more familiar with it. And there are all kinds of theories as to why that might be, all of which I think are mostly conjecture. You get a lot of, “well, there are still a lot of people there speaking Semitic languages.” But it’s the kind of thing you can never prove, and everybody can guess, and – maybe, who knows. But that’s just sort of how it historically happened.

So, all that is to say, in the Eastern churches, from the very beginning, Hebrews is accepted as part of this Pauline corpus, as part of this literary unit, St. Paul’s Epistles. But that isn’t to say that the people who were reading it didn’t notice some things. Some of it we’re going to talk about as we move on into the introduction, like the fact that it isn’t really an epistle. But also, just the Greek and the Greek style and everything is very different from what we see in St. Paul’s epistles. And I’m not talking about different—we talked about, when we started the pastoral epistles, and also when we introduced Ephesians and Colossians, these epistles of St. Paul that modern scholars doubt St. Paul wrote—we’re not talking about those kind of minor differences where we had explanations, we had kind of ready explanations for that. Reasons why, for example, writing a letter to a person and writing a letter to a community would look different. There’s obvious reasons. Why he’d be talking about different themes to different audiences. We’re not talking about those kind of differences. We’re talking about the way that, if you take St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and you take St. Mark’s Gospel, which is written in – most Biblical introductions try to be nice to St. Mark and they refer to his Greek as, like, “rustic,” which – it’s terrible. It’s terrible Greek. He’s communicating powerful things, but his Greek style is bad. Especially if you contrast him to somebody like St. Luke or St. Paul, where it’s really polished. St. Paul writes the way Epictetus writes in his Greek style. It’s impressive and complicated. Whereas St. Mark is just a big line of participles. But I won’t digress too much more about that. My old bone to pick with St. Mark. I love St. Mark’s Gospel; I hate trying to read it in Greek. So, it’s like that: comparing St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, they do not look like they were written by the same person. And it’s, again, beyond the level of, “this is a different scribe.”

But, that said, a lot of the concepts, the ideas, the way that St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews uses Old Testament quotes, and the way it interprets and applies them, general concepts and turns of phrase and that kind of thing, all looks very much like how St. Paul did things. And so, this is a case where we’re not just talking about modern critical scholars; from the beginning, Church Fathers are reading this, and then—you especially see this because it shows up a little later in the West than in the East—a lot of the Western Fathers, when they’re first experiencing it, they’re used to reading St. Paul’s epistles and now they have this other thing coming in, and they’re not rejecting it but they’re kind of going, “What’s up? What’s happening here?”

And so, you get – it’s really one set of theories but there’s two variations within it. The overall set of theories is that St. Paul is involved in this somehow, but someone else other than St. Paul is also involved. We’ll call that the overarching theory. So, how that plays out in different theories—and right now I’m still just talking about Church Fathers—is either some close affiliate of St. Paul—we’ve seen as we’ve gone through St. Paul’s epistles, he has a lot of traveling companions, and he’s had coauthors on some of his epistles, especially St. Timothy has written some of his epistles with him—one of those folks wrote it, but since they’re a close associate of St. Paul, they have the same theological outlook as St. Paul, they’ve been learning from St. Paul, they’ve been being mentored by St. Paul like we saw with Ss. Timothy and Titus, and so they kind of think and express themselves the way he did but they have a different writing style. And so, St. Paul is involved but not directly involved. The other variation of that is that St. Paul is involved in producing “something,” and then one of those associates turns that “something” into Hebrews. So, for example, there are some Fathers who propose—and this theory has a long life; Thomas Aquinas still thought so, this is where he went with it, so that gets you all the way to 1200—that St. Paul wrote something in Hebrew or Aramaic, because it was directed to Jewish folks, and St. Luke translated it, and St. Luke’s Greek translation is what we now call Hebrews.

The reason St. Luke is the one who usually gets singled out for that in these theories is that there are a lot of places in Hebrews where the Greek looks like St. Luke’s. And if it wasn’t St. Luke, that’s odd. The reason that’s odd is, St. Luke – what we have from him is the Gospel according to St. Luke, Acts of the Apostles, both of which are narrative; this is the story of Christ’s life, then the Apostles, especially focusing, in the latter part of the Acts of the Apostles, on St. Paul. So, it’s like historical narrative, and St. Luke sets it up by saying he did all this research and compiled all these sources. And in keeping with the form he’s using – St. Luke is very clearly aping especially Thucydides in his style in those books. He’s deliberately writing in a Greek historical style, so by using that style he’s putting his literary works into that genre of history that he’s presenting, which of course isn’t modern history but ancient history. But that’s how he’s putting it forward. So, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, we’re going to talk about whether it’s an epistle, but no matter how you slice it, it’s not historical narrative. This is not a historical narrative at all. So, the fact that there are these connections to St. Luke’s style are weird based on it being in another genre if it’s not the same author. So, that I think is the best evidence for St. Luke being involved, and, to put my cards on the table, by the end of this introduction I’m going to put forward my personal opinion—and I’m just saying it’s opinion, because there’s definitely not a single teaching of the Church on this; the Fathers are all over the place, and later authors in the Church as well—but I’m going to be putting forward a version of that. I do think St. Luke is involved, and for that reason; the stylistic things are too strong a connection, from something from another genre, to not have him involved. And he also is, of course, closely associated with St. Paul, and traveling with him. But I’ll come back to that.

So, in terms of the other theories – and the other theories are basically versions of, “some other affiliate of St. Paul wrote it,” and you will find people, both Church Fathers and modern people, modern scholars, going to bat for whole bunches of these. The oddest one, probably, which no one goes to bat for, and comes from one really obscure Church Father—well, I’m not even sure he’s a Church Father, that’s how obscure he is—ancient Christian writer, he’s not on the calendar of saints, we’ll put it that way, but he’s also not heretical. But he suggested that the Theotokos wrote it. I haven’t encountered anyone else in the history of the Church defending that idea, but it’s intriguing.

Interlocutor 2: What was the name of that author?

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to have to check again. I think he’s a “pseudo-” on top of everything else. Not that he wrote under another name, but they thought it was a work of somebody and it turns out it’s not, so he gets labeled as “Pseudo-” …it might be one of the Pseudo-Augustines, but I will double-check that. But that’s the weirdest one. But the more common ones you get, one of the first ones is Tertullian—and this is Tertullian while he was still a Christian—thought it was written by Barnabas. And St. Barnabas has been a popular pick in Church history, going all the way up to Martin Luther, but even contemporary scholars want to peg it as St. Barnabas. The problem with that is Tertullian’s argument; the core of Tertullian’s argument, the reason he picks Barnabas out of all of St. Paul’s associates, he picks St. Barnabas because he says, “Well, look how similar the Greek is to the Epistle of Barnabas.” Okay, but now we’re presupposing that St. Barnabas really wrote the Epistle of Barnabas, which, I don’t know that we think that necessarily. So that’s kind of a problematic argument.

And part of the problem with these theories is, you can name an associate of St. Paul and, okay, if you think an associate of St. Paul wrote it, maybe it was that one, but it’s hard to come up with any very strong argument that it’s this particular associate of St. Paul as opposed to all the others. So, the only thing we have for St. Barnabas – we don’t have anything St. Barnabas wrote in the New Testament, so you can say the Epistle of Barnabas – the Epistle of Barnabas is a little problematic in a couple of places, that’s why it’s not in the New Testament; it never held authority like that in Christian communities, so that’s not a strong one. And we’re going to see that with a bunch of these. So, there’s also people who say that they think St. Apollos wrote it. Well, okay. [laughter] But we don’t have anything written by St. Apollos to compare it to; why him as opposed to anyone else? But he’s a very popular one.

Now, recently – this is where I get to bash our nineteenth-century German friends, and especially the king of nineteenth-century German New Testament scholarship, Adolf von Harnack, who just has one of the most German names ever. He put forward this theory which, as soon as I tell you, you’re going to know why all of a sudden this is popular today, that it was written by St. Priscilla – of Priscilla and Aquila. So, here’s the argument. I’m going to try and steel-man this. I’m going to try and give you the best version. So, we’re going to talk in a minute about where it was written, too, so we’ll go into more detail on this, but there’s a general consensus that this was written to or for the Jewish community, the Judean community, in Rome. When we meet Ss. Priscilla and Aquila, who are numbered among the Seventy – and are Saints, so I’m not saying anything negative about them; I want to make that clear, because I’m going to be picking on von Harnack and I’m going to be picking on this idea, but I’m not saying anything negative about the Saints. When we meet Ss. Priscilla and Aquila in the Acts of the Apostles, it was when they had been expelled from Rome under Claudius and had gone to Corinth, and that’s where St. Paul meets them and they become Christians. And we saw them pop up later in the epistles, that it was in their home that some of the Saints were meeting. So, they become important, and in Church Tradition St. Aquila becomes a Bishop, and they’re numbered among the Seventy.

So, the thing that people have lit on, especially in recent days, however, is that at least in a few points where the two of them are mentioned, St. Priscilla is mentioned first, she being the wife. That is most likely because she was from some kind of prominent family, that she would be mentioned first. The money probably came through her. If they’re hosting the church, and if they’re living in Rome and able to move, this kind of thing, these are wealthy people, and her being mentioned first probably means that there was some inheritance going on. And under the Torah, if you didn’t have any sons, the oldest daughter could inherit. In the book of Numbers there’s a dispute that Moses settles, and establishes that. So, that’s probably why. But you could see how someone like von Harnack, and recent people, would parlay that into, “She’s listed first. She’s this prominent member of the community. They came from that Jewish community in Rome, so if this is written for them, they could’ve written it, so I bet she wrote it.”

And so, now, if you – I checked today. I was just curious. If you put into Google, “Who wrote Hebrews?” – I was super-curious, just what would come up, whether it would be, like, “Nobody knows.” Origen, for example, said, “Well, it’s St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews,” because that’s how he received it, but he said, “but who actually write it, God knows.” So, I’m just, “What’ll I get?” And we’ll just say, a prominent portion of what I got was, “A woman wrote one of the books of the New Testament.” Not, “A nineteenth-century German guy had a theory that a woman wrote one of the books of the New Testament,” not, “Maybe,” not anything. Just straight-out saying, “A woman wrote one of the books of the New Testament, the Church has been lying about it for two-thousand years and trying to say St. Paul wrote it,” all of that. All of that nonsense. So, I gave you—go do your own research—I didn’t just strawman this; I gave you all the evidence. All the evidence is, Ss. Priscilla and Aquila are from the community that most people agree this was written for. And the reason for choosing her as opposed to her husband as the author is… nothing.

Even if you were persuaded that one of them wrote it, there’s no particular evidence for either one. And going against it, there’s one point near the end of the Epistle to the Hebrews where the author refers to themselves, and they use a masculine pronoun. Now, von Harnack, of course, said, “Well, this is because of patriarchal authority structures in the Church, and so she had to conceal her gender, and blah blah blah blah blah,” which is what we call “special pleading.” If you’ve taken to an intro to logic class, that is what we call “special pleading.” Just casually dismissing the evidence against your point, which that is. And there is, again, there is not positive evidence anywhere, or any reason to believe that a woman wrote it over against a man and was using a fake pronoun that one time. There’s just no logical reason. So, yeah. Von Harnack was very much in a mode of, “Everything you think you know about the Bible is wrong. All traditions are wrong.” Surprisingly Postmodern for a nineteenth-century German. [laughter] But just sort of, “The general wisdom must always be wrong,” and so, I think we can safely set that aside – it’s not impossible; I can’t prove to you that St. Priscilla didn’t write it, but there’s no reason to think she did and a couple reasons to think—like the pronoun being used to refer to himself—that it was a male human who write it.

So, those are the major – and you’ll get some other weird random ones of Timothy, St. Timothy, or some other associate of St. Paul. But they fall under that same category. And the ones I just mentioned, St. Barnabas, St. Apollos, St. Priscilla, those are the ones that you see all over the place, and especially the St. Priscilla thing, now, people are all excited about that. Da Vinci Code got ‘em all worked up.

So, that’s the authorship thing.