TEXT [Commentary]

black diamond   VII.   Epistolary Conclusion (13:22-25)

22 I urge you, dear brothers and sisters,[*] to pay attention to what I have written in this brief exhortation.

23 I want you to know that our brother Timothy has been released from jail. If he comes here soon, I will bring him with me to see you.

24 Greet all your leaders and all the believers there.[*] The believers from Italy send you their greetings.

25 May God’s grace be with you all.

NOTES

13:22 pay attention. More accurately, “bear with” (NIV, NRSV) or “put up with” (see BDAG 78). There is a note of apology here, which the translation “pay attention” fails to capture.

what I have written. Or, “what I have sent.” The verb (epistellō [TG1989, ZG2182]) means “to send a letter” (BDAG 381; the Greek noun for “letter” is epistolē [TG1992, ZG2186]). It could obviously imply writing the letter as well, but does not have to. There is no way to tell from the verb alone.

brief exhortation. Lit., “the word of exhortation,” or sermon (see “Genre” in the Introduction).

13:24 all the believers there. More literally, “all the holy ones” or “saints” (hagioi [TG40A, ZG41]), emphasizing the fact that Christian believers are made “holy” through Christ’s suffering and death (2:11; see also 10:10, 14; 12:14). Paul used this word more commonly at the beginning than at the end of his letters (Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:2; 2 Cor 1:1; Eph 1:1; Phil 1:1; Col 1:2; see however Phil 4:21-22). The NLT substitutes “believers” because “holy ones” is easily misunderstood as angels and “saints” as elite Christians distinguished by exceptional piety.

13:25 May God’s grace be with you all. Lit., “grace be with you all.” Whether it is “God’s grace” or “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” is an open question, but the NLT is probably right (see “God’s grace” or “the grace of God” in 2:9 and 12:15).

COMMENTARY [Text]

The question the reader now has to decide is how to read the last four verses of Hebrews in relation to what has preceded them. Is the “I” of 13:22-25 the same person as the “I” who has just asked for prayer “that I will be able to come back to you soon” (13:19)? Is the “voice” of these concluding verses the same authorial voice we have been hearing throughout Hebrews 1:1–13:21? The answer seems obvious from the reference to “what I have written in this brief exhortation” (13:22, my italics). Yet it is not quite so simple, for “what I have written” is more literally “what I have sent” (see note on 13:22). The writer of these words could be sending along either his own work or someone else’s with his own comments or commendation. The reader is confronted with at least five options:

  1. Paul is the author of 13:22-25 and the rest of Hebrews.
  2. The author of 13:22-25 is the same as the author of the rest of Hebrews, but is not Paul.
  3. Hebrews 1:1–13:21 and 13:22-25 are the work of two different authors, neither of whom is Paul.
  4. Paul is the author of 13:22-25, but someone else is the author of the rest of Hebrews.
  5. Paul is the author of 1:1–13:21, but someone else has added 13:22-25 as a postscript.

The traditional view for centuries was (1); the conventional wisdom of modern critical scholarship favors either (2) or (3). No one that I know of has argued for (5), but the “Modest Proposal” put forward in the Introduction favors (4). Arguments for that proposal have been given (see section on “Author” in the Introduction), but what is needed here is a reading of these last four verses in light of that proposal, while at the same time keeping in mind other alternatives, particularly (2) and (3).

Whoever is writing the postscript, the phrase “this brief exhortation” must be read as referring to the book of Hebrews as a whole, not merely to these last four verses (as argued by Legg 1968:221 and Trobisch 1993:322). Otherwise it becomes a pointless bit of self-reference, as if to say, “I am briefly urging you to put up with what I am now briefly urging you.” The postscript itself, whether from the same author or a different one, is not so much an “exhortation” as simply a piece of news (13:23) and a word of greeting (13:24). The writer of these final words seems on the one hand to be apologizing for the length of what has gone before, urging the reader to “put up” with it (13:22 and note), while at the same time suggesting that (given the importance of its message) it might even be described as “brief” (dia bracheōn [TG1223/1024, ZG1328/1099]; see Stuart 1833:538: “[He wrote] that he had written briefly, considering the importance and difficulty of the subjects of which he had treated. And who will deny this?”).

If this writer is the author of Hebrews as a whole (options 1 or 2), the emphasis on brevity could be attributed to the book’s sermonic character. Even today preachers tend to underestimate the length of their sermons. Yet written rhetoric shares this trait as well. A similar phrase (di oligōn [TG1223/3641, ZG1328/3900]) occurs in 1 Peter 5:12 (see also Ignatius To Polycarp 7.3, and To the Romans 8.2), and it was not uncommon in ancient writing (including letters) to apologize either for having written at such great length or so briefly on matters of great moment. Even if the writer of the postscript is different from the author of the rest of Hebrews (options 3, 4, or 5), he is still apologizing for himself in a sense, for it is he who has taken the responsibility of sending this not so “brief” sermon on to these readers and asking them to “put up” with it. At this point (13:22), there is no clear-cut way to decide among the varied options. Whose voice are we hearing, that of the author of Hebrews (options 1 and 2) or someone else’s (options 3, 4, and 5)?

The next verse may provide some help. “I want you to know,” the same voice continues, “that our brother Timothy has been released from jail. If he comes here soon, I will bring him with me to see you” (13:23). The difference between this “I” and the “I” who requested prayer “that I will be able to come back to you soon” (13:19) is that here the speaker seems to have no doubt that he will in fact come “soon” and visit the community to which he was writing. The only question is whether Timothy will join him. If Timothy “comes here soon,” the two will come together; but if he does not, the speaker seems to anticipate coming alone. This suggests that the speaker in 13:19 was hindered in some way from coming, while the speaker in 13:23 is free to come any time, if the Lord so directs. That does not necessarily mean that Timothy was the speaker in 13:19 and therefore the author of Hebrews or that Paul is the speaker in 13:23 (see Introduction), but that remains at least a plausible scenario. Why else would Timothy be mentioned at all? And why was it important to the readers to know “that our brother Timothy has been released from jail” (13:23)? If that scenario is followed, then 13:22-25 is quite literally a “postscript,” that is, written after Hebrews 1:1–13:21, updating the rather uncertain outlook implied by the author’s concluding prayer request (13:19) and letting us know (to some extent) how things turned out.

Alternatively, on the assumption of a single voice throughout (options 1 and 2), 13:23 could be read as simply a clarification of 13:19. That is, the author first asked his readers to “pray that I will be able to come back to you soon” (13:19) and then gave as a reason for his delay the fact that he was waiting for Timothy to join him so that they could come together (13:23). On this reading, Timothy is not the author. Rather, the (anonymous) author’s prayer to be able to “come back soon” is in effect a prayer for the author and Timothy to be reunited. Neither reconstruction is conclusive by any means, and the authorship of Hebrews remains a mystery.

These last four verses do, however, suggest that Hebrews comes from the world of Paul, where Timothy’s name was well known and imprisonment for the gospel was a familiar occurrence. In that sense, if in no other, Hebrews deserves to be called a “Deutero-Pauline” letter (see discussion of “Author” in the Introduction), whoever its actual author may have been. Timothy, as we have seen, is as good a conjecture as any, and if Hebrews was preserved and sent on Paul’s authority, it is no surprise that Christian tradition has persistently identified Paul as the author. In any event, the notion defended by some that verses 22-25 are simply a later fiction designed to create a Pauline “atmosphere” and give Hebrews a credible Pauline setting is not a viable option. The very ambiguity of these verses belies any such assumption.

The postscript (if it is that) continues: “Greet all your leaders and all the believers there. The believers from Italy send you their greetings” (13:24). This final exchange of greetings again evokes Paul’s letters, though no more than is the case in, say, 1 Peter 5:13-14; 2 John 1:13; 3 John 1:15, or even Ignatius of Antioch some decades later (see To the Magnesians 15; To the Trallians 12; To the Smyrnaeans 12; To Polycarp 8). Paul sometimes sent greetings to particular named individuals or house churches (as in Rom 16:3-16; Col 4:15) or from named individuals or households (as in Rom 16:21-23; 1 Cor 16:19; Phil 4:22; Col 4:10-14). Other times his greetings were very general, both as to senders and recipients (see Rom 16:16, “all the churches of Christ”; 1 Cor 16:19, “the churches here in the province of Asia”; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:13, “all of God’s people here”; Phil 4:21-22, “to each of God’s holy people” and “all who belong to Christ Jesus”). The latter is the case in Hebrews, at least so far as the recipients are concerned. “All your leaders” are a group we have met before (13:17), along with their honored predecessors (13:7). The concern about “leaders” is common both to the body of Hebrews and to the postscript. “All the believers there” could be just a way of saying “one another” (as in Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12, characteristically greeted with “a sacred kiss”), or it could imply greetings from one house church to another in the same city.

As we have seen (see discussion of “Author” in the Introduction), the concluding notice that “the believers from Italy send you their greetings” is ambiguous. It could mean that Hebrews was written “from Italy” to an undisclosed location, or it could mean that certain “believers from Italy” were sending greetings back home from somewhere else in the Mediterranean world where they were (as it were) “foreigners and nomads” (see 11:13). Not even a close reading of the text can settle the question. But if we take account of Paul’s practice, it seems unlikely that our author would send greetings from only some of the believers in the city where he was staying (in this case, only those originally “from Italy”) and not from all (again, see Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:19-20; 2 Cor 13:12; Phil 4:21; Col 4:15), especially when his own greetings are sent to “all the believers there” (13:24, as in Phil 4:21, “to each of God’s holy people”). When he wanted to single out people from whom to send greetings, Paul normally named them, and we might have expected the author of Hebrews to do the same. This argues for Italy as the place of writing rather than the destination, which would explain why a number of the ancient colophons appended to our existing manuscripts opt for Hebrews having been written either “from Italy” or “from Rome,” never from anywhere else (see Introduction). That is the case in the majority of later manuscripts and consequently in the King James Version, where the colophon not only tells us, “Written to the Hebrews from Italy” but adds, “by Timothy” (more literally “through Timothy”).

The references to Timothy in the manuscripts obviously do not mean that Timothy is being named as the author, but they do imply that he either delivered the letter or assisted Paul in some way in writing it. The former option is glaringly inconsistent with the hope expressed in 13:23 that Timothy might come later in the company of the one who is writing, leaving us with the intriguing possibility that Timothy was thought to have been somehow involved in the actual composition of the work. Possibly we have here just a hint in later tradition of some kind of coauthorship, with Timothy as the author of the sermon comprising the bulk of Hebrews and Paul as its better known publicist or publisher. It is worth noting that Origen, in the third century, in almost the same breath that he famously remarked, “But who wrote the epistle, in truth God knows,” also stated “that the thoughts are the apostle’s, but that the style and composition belong to one who called to mind the apostle’s teachings and, as it were, made short notes of what his master said. If any church, therefore, holds this epistle as Paul’s, let it be commended for this also” (cited in Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 6.25.13-14; LCL 2.77-79). Although Origen did not mention Timothy (listing rather Luke and Clement of Rome as possibilities), and although there is no real evidence for the note taking he proposed, his comments are quite compatible with the notion of Paul and someone else as coauthors, and Timothy is as reasonable a guess as any.

All that remains is the final benediction, “May God’s grace be with you all” (13:25), a benediction which appears to be closely related to the Pauline benedictions. It is at least as close to most of them as they are to each other (see Rom 16:20; 1 Cor 16:23; 2 Cor 13:14; Gal 6:18; Eph 6:24; Phil 4:23; Col 4:18; 1 Thess 5:28; 2 Thess 3:18; 1 Tim 6:21; 2 Tim 4:22; Titus 3:15; Phlm 1:25). A pastor friend of mine, a traditionalist firmly committed to the Pauline authorship of Hebrews, once remarked to me that this benediction was clear evidence that Paul wrote Hebrews because of what he wrote at the end of 2 Thessalonians: “Here is my greeting in my own handwriting—Paul. I do this in all my letters to prove they are from me. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all” (2 Thess 3:17-18). I reminded him that this formula also occurs at the end of the book of Revelation, which is clearly not by Paul (see Rev 22:21), but he countered that this was not relevant because Revelation explicitly names someone else as the author (Rev 1:1), while Hebrews does not. His argument is less than convincing because Paul’s “distinguishing mark” was more likely a personal signature than the “Grace be with you” formula (see Gal 6:11). Yet taken with other considerations already mentioned, the final benediction in Hebrews points in the direction of a letter that wants to be received as in some sense Pauline. It is probably too late to envision a day in which scholars will again speak of “Paul” as the author of Hebrews in the same way that they continue to speak of “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John” in full awareness of the controversies about authorship surrounding each of these equally anonymous documents. If they were to do so, however, it might not be a bad thing but might, on the contrary, be helpful in placing Hebrews properly within the New Testament canon.