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Ephesians . . . . . It plainly appears then, that the sections of the Codex Vaticanus must
have been copied from some yet older document, in which the epistle to the Hebrews
preceded that to the Ephesians."
This arrangement undoubtedly exhibits this association as obtaining in very early
times, possibly the sub-Apostolic age, and that originally, the one epistle followed the
other with nothing between. In which case, in a professedly Pauline section of the N.T.,
we find Galatians and Hebrews merely separated the one from the other by two words:
Pros Hebraious, To Hebrews, and this, as we have noted, may not have formed part of
the original text.
Dr. Thirtle asks: "Was this in reality dividing? Why not--sub-dividing?" He goes
on to propound the theory that the epistle to the Hebrews was a covering letter to the
Galatian letter and circulated with it, being specially addressed to a Hebrew Christian
section in Galatia. In which case, the problem of the introduction without the author's
name is solved, as the name of the Apostle Paul is evident in Gal. 1: 1, and would not
need to be repeated in the covering letter. As these two epistles became detached in
course of time the anonymity of Hebrews naturally became a problem and its position in
the N.T. writings became lost, being finally located after the Pastoral Epistles and
Philemon, its present position.
Another problem would also be solved if Galatians and Hebrews circulated together
and that is the extraordinary omission of the passing of the privilege of circumcision in
Hebrews, one of whose main objects is to show that the types and shadows of Israel's
economy had been fulfilled in the Antitype, the Lord Jesus Christ, and thus had become
redundant. Yet circumcision, one of the main bases of Jewish pride and privilege, is not
mentioned in the epistle to the Hebrews. This is understandable if these two epistles were
designed to be kept together, for circumcision had been adequately dealt with in
Galatians.
Dr. Thirtle leaned toward an Aramaic original. He felt that Gal. 6: 11, "Ye see how
large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand", refers not to large lettering
due to defective eyesight, but to an epistle written by the Apostle `with my own
handwriting', possibly Aramaic; just as some have held to have been the case with the
Gospel of Matthew. That gramma, `letter' in the plural can mean this is confirmed by
Arndt and Gingrich:
"A document, piece of writing, mostly in the plural even of single copies"
(I Esdras 3: 9, 13; Esther 8: 5, etc. A Greek-English Lexicon of the N.T.).
To the objection to an Aramaic original, the writer of Hebrews citing generally from
the LXX and not the Hebrew text, he states that this feature "is consistent with a
translation made by someone who saw reasons for following the general guidance of the
LXX, but has not troubled to tell us why". And as regards the difficulty of the Greek
being a literal expression of the Hebrew (Aramaic) he says: "If the Apostle could write
good Hebrew (Aramaic), then a really competent translator could give the same attractive
Greek. Such a writing as we actually possess, the Salkinson-Ginsburg version of the
N.T., into Hebrew shows that every sentiment of the epistle may be expressed in glowing