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we have 11: 32 ". . . . . the time would fail me telling . . . . ." where the participle
diegoumenon, `telling', is masculine, and once more we have nothing written by Aquila
and Priscilla with which to compare the letter to the Hebrews. Sir William Ramsay
hazarded Philip the deacon; others have favoured Silas.
Calvin thought of Luke or Clement of Rome as the author, and in the case of Luke we
are on different ground, for we have the Acts of the Apostles and his Gospel with which
to compare.
Professor F. F. Bruce writes:
"Stylistically Hebrews is close to the writings of Luke than to anything else in the
N.T., but this may be because our author and Luke approximate more closely than other
N.T. writers to the model of literary Hellenistic--our author even more than Luke."
(The Epistle to the Hebrews, p.41).
Many scholars have noticed the remarkable likeness of Luke's Greek to that of
Hebrews and we shall have more to say about this later on.
No.2.
pp. 53 - 57
One solution to the difficult question of the authorship of this epistle was put forward
in 1916 by Dr. J. W. Thirtle, then editor of The Christian, namely that the Hebrews
epistle was a covering letter or enclosure circulated with the epistle to the Galatians. He
pointed out that in early times the epistle to the Hebrews followed that to the Galatians.
This is evident from an examination of the Greek manuscript known as Codex B
(Vaticanus) belonging to the fourth century. This famous manuscript exhibits, in the
words of Bishop Westcott:
"A marginal numeration which shows that the whole collection of Pauline epistles was
divided, either in its archetype or in some earlier copy, into a series of sections numbered
consecutively. In this collection the epistle to the Hebrews comes between the epistle to
the Galatians and the Ephesians."
(The Epistle to the Hebrews, p.xxx).
This arrangement approximates to that of the Thebaic and Bashmuric versions, in
which the epistle comes between II Corinthians and Galatians. The mass of later
Greek MSS follow the Syriac and place the epistle after the pastoral epistles and
Philemon, which order has passed into the Received Text probably under this influence,
and so gives us its present place in the N.T. Dr. F. H. Scrivener gives a similar
testimony in his Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament p.54:
"The Pauline epistles are reckoned throughout as one book in the older notation, with
however this remarkable peculiarity, that though in the Codex Vaticanus itself the epistle
to the Hebrews stands next after the second to the Thessalonians, and on the same leaf
with it, the section are arranged as if it stood between the epistles to the Galatians and