DATE
DATE
It is difficult to be certain about the date of Hebrews. The principal points in the debate are these:
1. That the addressees and apparently the author himself belong to the second generation of Christians (Heb. 2:3) does not yield much concrete information, since "second generation” must be understood not chronologically but genealogically.
Probably one should infer that the epistle was not written before A.D. 50; most would insist not before 60.
2. Although some of the quotations of Hebrews in 1 Clement are disputed, it is exceedingly difficult to dismiss the repeated references to Hebrews 1 in 1 Clement 36:1
6. 21 The overwhelming majority of scholars date 1 Clement to A.D. 96. If accepted, this would put a terminus ad quem on the date of Hebrews. It must be admitted, however, that the primary reason for dating 1 Clement so precisely is that some words from the first chapter—"the sudden and repeated misfortunes and calamities which have befallen us”—refer to persecution of Christians under the Emperor Domitian. Evidence for such persecution is slight (see discussion in 23. Revelation, DATE below). If it is discounted, the range of possible dates for 1 Clement is opened up from about 70 22 to about 140, 23 with several mediating positions. The very late dates are unlikely, since 1 Clement is cited as an authoritative source by Clement of Alexandria, and the 96 date still seems most plausible; but it is important to recognize the limits of our knowledge.
3. If, as seems likely, the Timothy mentioned in Hebrews 13:23 is the younger companion of Paul, then the epistle to the Hebrews must have been written within his lifetime. Paul co-opted him into missionary service c. A.D. 49, but we do not know how old he was at the time. Still, this probably establishes the upper limit for Hebrews to be about 100, very close to the upper limit imposed by the traditional dating of 1 Clement.
4. Many have attempted to tie the words of Hebrews 12:4 ("in your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood”) to the particular period of persecution leading up to the persecution under Nero. If the language is figurative, signaling nothing more than strenuous opposition to sin, the passage has no bearing on the date of the book. But even if the passage is understood, somewhat more naturally, to refer to the death of martyrs, it is exceedingly difficult to draw certain inferences. For example, one might conclude that this rules out the church in Rome during or immediately after Nero’s persecution, because Christians at that time did lose their lives. That might suggest a date earlier than Nero’s persecution (A.D. 64). Alternatively, one might suppose this was written to believers elsewhere in the empire who had heard what their fellow believers had already suffered under Nero but who had not themselves faced opposition that had gone so far. In that case, the book was written after Nero. Similar arguments have been mooted with respect to the reign of Domitian. Above all, opposition from the synagogue sporadically broke out here and there in every decade of the first century, after A.D. 30, making it rather hazardous to use Hebrews 12:4 to isolate a particular date.
5. Perhaps the most important discussion turns on the occurrence of present-tense verbs in connection with the ritual (Heb. 7:8; 9:6-7, 9, 13; 13:10). In English translation, they read as if the ceremonies are continuing at the time the author is writing. There are two flaws in this argument. First, the present tense in Greek, even in the indicative, does not necessarily refer to present time. Even traditional approaches to Greek grammar observe the frequency of the so-called historic present in Greek; a more linguistically informed approach, appealing to aspect theory, doubts that the (morphological) "present tense” has any immediate bearing on time. 24Second, Clement of Rome, writing after the destruction of the temple, uses present tenses to describe similar ritual (1 Clem. 41); similarly, Josephus alternates between present and past tenses in his discussion of the tabernacle and its furnishings (Ant. 4.102-50) and of the vestments of the priests (Ant. 4.151-87). Some also point out that the epistle to the Hebrews never specifically mentions the temple: its focus is the biblical tabernacle, and this suggests (they argue) that the destruction of the second temple would not have been of great interest to the author. Therefore silence as to its destruction is no evidence of an early date.
But although the linguistic argument is not decisive, another form of this argument is far stronger. When Josephus, for instance, describes the tabernacle, furnishings, and priestly vestments, he is not engaged in a theological argument about their principial obsolescence, about their utter replacement by the corresponding realities of the new covenant; but that lies at the very heart of the argument in Hebrews. When the author cites Jeremiah’s prophecy of a new covenant (Jer. 31:31-34; Heb. 8:7-12), he concludes that by calling this covenant new, God through Jeremiah "made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear” (8:13). The law-covenant "can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, would they not have stopped being offered?” (10:1-2). It is difficult not to conclude that the sacrifices were still being offered when the author wrote such lines as these. Although he does not directly refer to the temple, he could not have spoken in such terms if he did not see the sacrifices at the temple in fundamental continuity with those established for the tabernacle. By the same token, if the sacrifices of the temple had ended (as they did in A.D. 70), 25 it is hard to imagine how he could have resisted pointing this out. As Lindars indicates, the thrust of his rhetoric is to establish the exclusive finality of Christ’s sacrifice, 26 and to prevent his readers from returning to the sacrificial system from which they had been weaned when they first became Christians. Had the temple sacrifices already ceased, his argument would have had to be cast in a different guise. True, this is an argument from silence; but it is a powerful argument from silence because, given the nature of his polemic, we expect noise: it is hard to imagine how the author could maintain such silence if he were writing after the destruction of the temple. Although not conclusive, this constitutes strong support for a date before 70 for Hebrews. 27
6. The strongest argument for a late date turns on the attempt to plot where this book should lie on the trajectory of the development of early Christianity. For instance, it is often argued that the Christology of Hebrews (esp. Heb. 1:1-3) reflects the same sort of high Christology found in, say, Luke-Acts, 1 Peter, or the Pastorals, all of them frequently dated to 75-90. But not only is the dating of these documents also disputed, with many scholars insisting on a date before 70 for one or more of these books, but more important, the Christology of Hebrews 1:1-3 is certainly no "higher” than that found in such passages as 1 Corinthians 8:6, Philippians 2:6-11, or Colossians 1:15-20. The overwhelming majority of scholars recognize these passages to be pre-70, and many of them think they represent pre-Pauline thought.
Thus, although one cannot decisively rule out any date between about A.D. 60 and 100, the preponderance of evidence favors a date before 70.