whoever he was, God the Holy Spirit overruled what he wrote, so that it could become

part of inspired Scripture and He is the real Author. From another point of view the

answer is "yes", for if Hebrews cannot be included in the Pauline collection of epistles,

then the perfect arrangement and balance is upset.

There are 21 epistles in the N.T., and with Hebrews included in Paul's writings there

is a perfect balance of sevens:

While we do not wish to imagine or invent sevens in the Scriptures, the employment

of this number by God from the very beginning of creation (seven days), its reiteration in

the economy of Israel (the sabbath; seven weeks `Pentecost'' seven years `sabbath of

the land'; 7X7 years to the Jubilee; 70X7 years of Dan. 9:; and the seven times of

Leviticus), and in addition the accumulation of sevens in the book of the Revelation and

elsewhere, show us that the purpose of the ages in Christ is divinely designed in sevens,

and we therefore are not surprised to find the same feature in the epistles of the N.T. and

we should not lightly set this aside.

If Hebrews is not linked with Paul, then we have thirteen epistles from him, (an

ominous number, and linked with Satan in the Scriptures), the balance of epistles during

and after the Acts is upset and moreover we have no epistle during the Acts which gives

the doctrine of the practical outworking and perfecting of faith with reward in view.

Hebrews stands to the Pentecostal church much in the same way as Philippians and

II Timothy do to the prison ministry of the Apostle Paul, through which ministry the

joint-Body, i.e. the Body of Christ, is unfolded.

If we were asked whose pen wrote the epistle to the Hebrews, we should hazard the

opinion, for what it is worth, that Luke was the amanuensis or editor. Luke was the close

companion of Paul right to the end (II Tim. 4: 11). We have not only his own writings

(The Gospel and Acts) with which to compare, but also his reporting of Paul's speeches

in the Acts period. We have before remarked on the likeness of Luke's Greek style to the

Hebrews epistle, a feature which has been noticed by many scholars, and the Lucan

tradition goes back, as we have seen, to the beginning of Christianity.

However, no one can dogmatically say who the penman was, and we feel a little

modesty may not be amiss here. If early Christian scholars were not sure, how can we

be, living more than 1900 years later? We believe Origen summed up the position well

when he stated that he believed that "the thoughts are the thoughts of the Apostle, but the

language and the composition, that of one who recalled from memory and, as it were,

made notes of what was said by his master . . . . . it was not without reason that men of