The Pauline History of Hebrews and the Memory of a Jewish Apostle

The Letter to the Hebrews became a Pauline epistle through material configuration and readerly appropriation. Eschewing ‘acceptance’ and ‘rejection’ as ways of describing ancient engagement with authorial claims, the Paulinity of Hebrews was guided and sustained primarily through manuscript transmission which fitted this text with material markers of Paulinity as it circulated within Pauline letter collections. Emerging out from this material priority, the ‘Paulinity’ of the letter within Christin literary projects in the second and third centuries is markedly unstable. Active participation within the discourse surrounding the Pauline authorship of Hebrews does not begin to describe how readers may configure and appropriate the letter as Pauline within the context of their own corpus, with its unique interests and culturally specific contexts. The hermeneutical posture which early readers (Clement and Origen) find in and employ for Hebrews as Pauline is conditioned by their ‘need’ for a Jewish Apostle in conceptualizing the difference between Christianity and Judaism as distinct and different entities. Building on this early hermeneutical instability, the prefatory practices developed in the fourth century become the placeholders for discourse about Pauline authorship, and in this way, the preface becomes the means by which Pauline authorship is institutionalized from Late Antiquity to the Early modern period. The various hypotheses, argumenta, and other kinds of prefatory markers for the letter, reinscribe Origen’s interpretive lens for Hebrews as Pauline letter on the nature of Jewish reading.