Produced by Colin Bell, Thomas Strong and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net {Transcriber's Note: Obvious typographical errors, printing errors and mis-spellings have been corrected. Any other inconsistencies remain as they are in the original. Footnotes have been placed at the end of the paragraph in which they appear.} MESSAGES FROM THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS MESSAGES FROM THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS _By_ HANDLEY C.G. MOULE, D.D. BISHOP OF DURHAM LONDON: ELLIOT STOCK 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 1909 THE BIBLE IS THE SKY IN WHICH GOD HAS SET CHRIST THE SUN. JOHN KER, D.D. _First Edition May 1909_ _Second Impression July 1909_ PREFACE 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 _prima 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. In any case the author, if not an apostle, was a prophet. And he carries to us a prophet's "burthen" of unspeakable import, and in words to which all through the Christian ages the soul has responded as to the words of the Holy Spirit. HANDLEY DUNELM. _Easter, 1909._ CONTENTS I PAGE