TWELVE
A New High Priest
Later tradition has incorporated the assertions of the Letter to Hebrews, making the priesthood an accepted institution in some branches of Christianity. This fact masks the novelty of what was attested nowhere outside the Letter among the early writings. But unless we see that the Letter was making a new case for Jesus as priest, using the rejected Jewish institution as a model, we cannot evaluate the selective reading of the ceremonies Jewish priests performed, the substitution of human sacrifice for animal sacrifice, and the attempt to smuggle the priesthood back through the side door of Melchizedek. So important is the title of high priest to the Letter—though that title comes not from Melchizedek but from the Aaronic priesthood—that Christ is called our high priest seven times in Hebrews (2.17, 3.1, 5.10, 6.20, 7.26, 8.1, 9.11).
We also have to pay close attention to what the Letter does not claim. It nowhere says that the priesthood would be a continuing institution for Christian men (or women). In fact, it says the opposite. Jesus is the last priest, whose onetime offering makes all other priesthoods obsolete. Like Melchizedek, Jesus has no lineage before or after him, just the single and isolated act of one all-accomplishing sacrifice. It was only after the Letter had insinuated the new concept of Jesus as a priest that other aspects of Jewish practice could make their way into Christian gatherings—including the idea of a continuing line of priests who were not Jesus themselves but prolonged the repetition of his unrepeatable act.
The Letter would not spell out at such length what Jesus validates from Jewish practice if it were not presenting something novel, something meant to reassure the Roman Christians who yearned back toward their Jewish roots. It was laying a new foundation for an altered belief. No wonder the Letter calls it something added to old and accepted teachings—old teachings like the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment. This new thing is hard to reason out in words (dysermeneutos legein, 5.11), though the Letter makes an energetic effort to do just that. Here is the Jewish foundation being laid for the higher priesthood of Jesus (9.1–10):
The first Pact, it is true, had rules for worship, and a sanctuary in the created order. There a Shrine was prepared; in it were the lampstand, and the table, and the place for grain offering—it was called the Holy Place. But beyond a second veil was the Holy of Holies, with the gold incense-altar and the Ark of the Pact cased in gold. Here were the gold jar keeping the manna, the staff of Aaron that blossomed, the tablets of the Pact, and the Cherubim of Splendor hovering above the Purgation Site—things it is now impossible to describe exactly.
Given these arrangements, the priests continually enter the first Shrine to perform the sacred acts, but into the second only the high priest enters, and only once a year, and not without blood to offer for himself and for the people’s unrecognized sins. As the Holy Spirit makes clear, the way into the sanctuary cannot be revealed while there is still validity in the first Shrine—which is a symbol for its time, where gifts and sacrifices are offered without the power to restore the inner self of the one performing them, affecting as they do food and drink and ablutions, fleshly requirements imposed before the moment of their being put right.
The modern reader may well be puzzled by the fact that the high priest offers sacrifice for sins that are “unrecognized” (agno
mat
n, 9.7). But the purity rules for Jewish observance and for proper ritual were so extensive and complex that it was easy for those wanting to be part of any ceremony to have omitted some requirement without knowing it (K 206, 397).1 So the priest must first purify the impure before their sacrifice can be accepted. Ritual performance must, by its very nature, be carried out punctiliously. As the scholar Hugh Lloyd-Jones says of similarly exigent classical Greek ritual: “The recital of details which might seem boring to the uninitiated person is in fact absolutely necessary…immense importance [is] attached to the proper performance…[including] the ritual silence which the proper performance of sacrifice required.”2 The Jewish priests had even higher stakes for their performance. Jacob Milgrom explains:
Israel, like its contemporaries, was of the opinion that the slightest deviation from the prescribed ritual would not only nullify the ritual but arouse the wrath of the deity…The sanctuary would not be purged, leaving the prospect that the Lord would abandon it and his people to their doom.3
Such punctiliousness is signaled in the first Pact’s “rules” (dikaimata, 9.1). These presumed (gar) that the outer Shrine be “prepared” (kateskeuasth) for worship “in the created order” (kosmikon, as opposed to the heavenly sanctuary soon to be mentioned). Given such precision, it comes as something of a surprise that the Letter does not everywhere conform to the prescriptions in the “rule books” of the Pentateuch (K 395–96). The Letter says that the jar of manna and Aaron’s staff were contained inside the Ark (9.4), though Scripture says they were placed outside it (Ex 16.30, Num 17.10). The Letter says the incense-altar was placed inside the Holy of Holies (9.4), though Scripture says it was outside it (Ex 30.1–10).4
Koester reasons that there were probably different traditions about ancient arrangements (K 395), which may be why the Letter says that the situation “is now impossible to describe exactly” (9.5). It was important for the Letter’s author to describe what his target audience thought about Jewish practices, since he is going to make a careful comparison/contrast with the new dispensation brought by Jesus. This fact reinforces what is clear from the Letter taken as a whole—that the author, though not present in Rome at the time of writing, had been there before and knew intimately the people he is addressing. He has to stick to what his audience thought about Mosaic Law.
Having set the template for the old (discontinued) procedures in the Shrine of the traveling Ark, the Letter now draws the contrast with what Jesus offers to the backsliding Romans:
Christ, however [de], is now at hand [paragenomenos], high priest of blessings that are to come in a greater and final Shrine, one not made by hands, indeed not in this order of creation. He has made a one-time [hapax] entry into this Holy Place, pioneering [heuronemos] an all-time [ainion] rescue, not by virtue of goat blood or calf blood, but by his own blood. If, after all, the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer, make holy the unclean, purifying even the flesh, how much more does Christ’s blood, unstained, offered in the timeless Spirit, cleanse the inner self of deathly activity to serve the God of life? (9.11–14)
Here begins the point-by-point contrast between sacrifice under the old Pact and sacrifice under the new.
The old took place in a structure made by hand, in the created order.
The new takes place in a non-material sanctuary outside the created order.
The old had a daily service in the outer Shrine, and an annual ceremony in the Holy of Holies.
The new offering takes place only once, and its effect lasts forever (ainion).
The old sacrifice had to purify the sacrificer himself from his sins.
The new one is offered by one unstained (ammon) by sin.
The old cleansing went only as deep as the flesh.
The new one restores innocence to the inner self (syneidsis).
The old Pact went by the times of calendrical prescription.
The new one is offered through the timeless (ainios) Spirit.
This first comparison sketches the outline of the Letter’s argument. The author is about to go deeper into the contrasts, and to go deeper into trouble. The odd legalistic turn of the author’s mind now turns sacrifice into a testamentary bequest.
This is what makes him the guarantor of a new Pact, so that—a death having taken place for release from offenses committed under the first Pact—those designated might receive the everlasting inheritance that was pledged them. Where inheritance is concerned, the death of the testator must be certified; it has no force so long as the testator is alive. Thus even the first Pact was not initiated without blood. After every requirement of the Law had been promulgated by Moses to the entire people, he took the blood of calves, along with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled the book itself and all the people, saying, “This is the blood of the Pact that God has put into effect for you.” And the Shrine and all the instruments of worship he sprinkled in the same way with blood. That is why nearly all purifications under the Law are by blood, since without shed blood there is no freeing from sin. (9.15–22)
When the Letter moves the category of Christ’s action from sacrifice to bequest, the author makes what at first is a surprising assertion—that for Christ to certify the bequest he must first die. This is surprising because the Letter had earlier made Melchizedek’s priesthood superior to that of the Levites because the latter all die while Melchizedek does not (7.23–24). Of course, though Jesus dies to fulfill the requirement of his bequest, he rises again to eternal life (in legal terms, would that invalidate the bequest?). He is the sacrificial victim in the shedding of his blood, but the sacrificing priest in his offering of that blood. The Jewish template that was first invoked and then transcended leads to difficulties. It is not easy to make Jesus the priest and the victim of a sacrifice that leaves a bequest to those not the recipients of the sacrifice. Believers in Jesus receive the bequest, but the Father receives the sacrifice.
The slaughter that supplied the necessary blood for sacrifice under the first Pact was carried out by the priests or their agents—they must kill the sacrificial animal to have a claim on it before surrendering it to Yahweh. Does Jesus have to kill himself in order to possess the victim for offering to the Father, having become the victim after killing it? As we shall see later on, the idea that Jesus as priest had to kill the sacrifice (himself) perturbed later Christian thinkers. They labored at nervous and convoluted denials. Besides, the remains of the sacrificed animals were disposed of by burning—a far cry from Jesus’ being seated at the Father’s right hand as a perpetual victim/priest. If what Jesus is doing is making out a bequest, the receivers of the bequest are not the receivers of the sacrifice—which is offered to the Father, who can get no benefits from the bequest.
The Letter is tangling itself in increasingly intricate consequences.
Now if the copy of the heavens must be purified by such sacrifices, heaven itself must be purified by sacrifices that are higher still. Christ, you know, entered no Holy Place of human construction, the mere reflection of what truly is, but into the reality itself, standing face to face with God as our representative—not to offer himself over and over, as the high priest enters the sanctuary annually to offer blood not his own. Doing that would mean, for Jesus, his own repeated dying down through ages. Instead, when the wait of ages ended, he came on the scene a single time, to erase sin by sacrificing himself. And whereas a single death is set for all men, and after that judgment, correspondingly Christ made a single offering to forgive the sins of many, and after that will he appear again, without sin, to rescue those waiting for him. (9.23–28)
The first sentence of this passage has led to tortuous exercises in explication. Paul Ellingworth counts eight entirely different interpretations of verse 9.23. David Allen counts nine. And there are more.5 The Letter has, up to this point, been arguing that heaven is a far more sacred “sanctuary” than the pale replica of it in the Shrine’s Holy of Holies. Yet now it says that even heaven needed purifying by higher “sacrifices” (plural) than those carried out in the Shrine. What made it need this re-holying of the holiest place? And how was it to be purified? I have already quoted Ceslas Spicq as saying, “The idea of prior impurity makes no sense where the heavenly sanctuary is concerned” (S 2.267). Then how does he treat the passage? He considers four possibilities, in an ascending order of acceptability (S 2.266–68).
Spicq
1. Since the church is a temple of God, it is the thing being purified—a reading he calls “quite arbitrary.”
2. Patristic authors wrote that the angelic rebellion began in heaven, so Christ completes the purifying of all diabolic traces of the place from which they fell—he calls this more acceptable (plus satisfaisant).
3. Even better is the idea that the blood of Christ is a kind of “immunization” against sin—as the high priest was purified by blood before he entered the Holy of Holies. Since Jesus himself needs no immunizing against sin, this must apply to “the body of Christ made up of believers,” a body of which he is the head. So he purifies those he is taking with him to heaven.
4. Spicq mainly prefers to take “purify” as meaning “dedicate”—so Jesus dedicates heaven to a new purpose, for receiving those he has redeemed. Ellingworth accepts this reading, though there are no real parallels for “purify” meaning “dedicate.”6
Koester
Since the Shrine is an antitype to the type in heaven, lower purifications should echo higher ones: “Christ did not purify the heavenly sanctuary because he was bound to follow the Levitical pattern; rather, the reverse is true” (K 427). But this goes against the argument of Hebrews, that Jewish sacrifice is the foreshadowing of the heavenly. By Koester’s logic, the lower should not need purifying because the heavenly is already pure.
Attridge
Since “cultic cleansing is a matter of the heart and mind,” it is the conscience of believers that is purified as they participate in Christ’s rise to represent them in heaven.7 But the text says nothing about believers, just about Christ’s entry into heaven as purifying heaven. Peter O’Brien, David Allen, and F. F. Bruce agree with the Attridge argument.8
Lane
William Lane, against almost all other commentators, takes the text literally, which Spicq said would be “monstrous.” He argues: “Sin as defilement is contagious…reaching even to the heavenly things themselves.”9
Bourke
Myles Bourke assumes that there were two chambers to heaven, corresponding to the outer Shrine and inner Shrine on earth. Then the purifying of heaven would apply only to “the intermediate heavens, which correspond to the outer part of the earthly tabernacle.”10 There is no biblical support for multiplying heavens in this way.
Johnson
Luke Timothy Johnson thinks that the parallel between purifying the Shrine and purifying heaven just shows carelessness on the author’s part: “This may be a case where grammatical choice is governed by the logic of the image rather than by the logic of the argument.”11 Before we dismiss such a conclusion, we should remember that Myles Bourke said something similar about the difficulties the Letter got into when it ended up with two “priests forever” and did not know what to do with the first one (Melchizedek) when the second one (Christ) returned to heaven.12 Bourke thought that when the Letter lined up two things parallel with each other, it seized one point of similarity between the two and then overlooked all the crippling differences that this entailed.
A perfect example of these strained parallels is still to come in the Letter, in an aside contained in its final chapter.
Do not veer off after fancy and unusual teachings—since it is well, you know, for the heart to be steadied by God’s favor, not by food codes that did no good for those observing them in the past. We have an altar where officiators at the Shrine are not allowed to eat. The animals, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin-offerings, have their carcasses burnt outside the camp—just as Jesus, in order to sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the city gate. Let us go to him outside the camp, to share his humiliation, since we have no lasting city here but are on a quest for that to come. (13.9–13)
There is a dizzying sequence in that passage, made up of connections that hurry by (Thomas Aquinas called them “quite finespun,” valde subtilis). Consider the flow of the argument:
(a) It is a novelty to revert to Jewish eating codes, but
(b) we have an eating code to which others have no access, since
(c) Jesus was not sacrificed inside the sanctuary; rather,
(d) he was killed outside the city, and
(e) we should stay outside the earthly city, looking toward a heavenly one.
Take these slippery steps one at a time:
(a) Against “Novelty”
In a bit of rhetorical one-upmanship, the Letter says that reverting to Jewish legalism is, in the context of the Pact Jesus initiated, following ideas that are “fancy” (poikilai) and “unusual” (xenai). As opposed to such giddy itchings, the heart should stay steady (kardia bebaia) with God’s help, not by legalisms that failed in the past. It is ironic that the “new” teaching is shown to be a “past” failure.
(b) Proper “Eating”
Against the false “novelty” of Jewish eating codes, the Roman Christians should eat at the new Pact’s altar, from which others are interdicted. What is the altar, and who are the others? It has been easy for later Christians to think this verse refers to the Eucharist, eaten at the Mass. That is especially appealing since the Genesis account of Melchizedek says he gave Abraham “food” (14.18). From the late second century, when Clement of Alexandria applied this verse to the Eucharist, this has been part of the Melchizedekian priesthood (K 26). But the Letter omits the mention of bread and wine when it describes the meeting of Melchizedek and Abraham (7.1–3). Clearly the author did not connect Melchizedek with the Eucharist, as Spicq confirms (S 2.245–47). In fact, nowhere does the Letter refer to the Eucharist (K 569).
Then what is the altar referred to in Hebrews, from which some are barred? Start with the latter point. Those interdicted are called “officiators” (latreuantes) at the Shrine of Moses. But there were no such worshipers, any more than there was a Shrine. It had long ago been replaced by Solomon’s Temple, and then by Herod’s Temple—and both of those were gone. That seems to be the point of the Letter. The Judaizing Romans were longing back to a failed first Pact. Even if the survivors of that ritual world were still around, they could not be part of the altar of the new Pact. The Letter says they could not eat at the altar of the new Pact. What does “not” mean? The author is running the parallel with the failed food code of verse 13.9—just as he made the careless coupling of eternal priesthood in the Melchizedek-Christ comparison, or in the Shrine-heaven coupling. What Bourke and Johnson said about his failure to think through a comparison, after noting some salient aspect of it, is true here as well.
The “eating at the altar” is, by the logic of the Letter, a way of receiving the benefits of the new sacrifice made by Jesus, one that is just as efficacious as the old Pact’s requirements had been feckless. Spicq (2.45), Koester, and many others follow Thomas Aquinas in saying, “The altar referred to is either Christ’s cross, where Christ was offered up for us, or Christ himself, in whom and through whom we direct our prayers.”13
We must remember that the author is writing for a specific audience. He did not think he was writing for the ages, or putting a new item in the inspired canon. He thinks always of what will work with the Romans who were yearning back to Jewish eating (and other) habits. He says that the Jews, even when they had the Shrine from Moses, did not have what believers in the new Pact have—the final eschatological feast with Jesus in heaven (the feast referred to in the Lord’s Prayer).14
(c) Where Jesus Was Sacrificed
By a leap in thought backward, the author says that the old Pact’s sacrifice was made in the Holy of Holies, but the sacrifice of Jesus did not take place in what, so far, the author has treated as the antitype-type pairing with the Holy of Holies—namely, heaven—but outside the camp. In a kind of bait-and-switch, the camp of the Mosaic exodus has become Jerusalem in Jesus’ time. The Letter is making one of those imbalanced balancing acts between sacrifice under the old Pact and under the new. The supposed equivalents line up this way, comparing the high priest’s Yom Kippur sacrifice with Jesus’ offering to the Father:
| Offering in Holy of Holies |
Offering in Heaven |
| High Priest |
Son of God |
| Annual |
Eternal |
| Goats and Bulls |
Jesus |
| Temporary Forgiveness |
Lasting Forgiveness |
Now measure the specific events (13.10–12) against this abstract template, putting in ordinary type what is expected from the logic of the schema and in uppercase what must be added:
| Slaughter of Victims |
Crucifixion |
| Offering in Holy of Holies |
Offering in Heaven |
| BURNING OF CARCASSES |
CRUCIFIXION |
Why is the Crucifixion, out of logical and chronological order, repeated before and after the offering? The burning of the carcasses, in the first column, is a mere afterthought to dispose of the unsacrificed parts of the animal. The animal is slaughtered in the outer court of the Shrine by laymen, then its sacred blood is splashed on the altar of atonement by the high priest, and then the unclean residue of the sacrifice, its physical remnants, are burnt “outside the camp,” and the choice animal parts are burnt on the altar for God’s acceptance. Only then are the unsacrificed (and so unclean) parts of the animal taken out to unsanctified ground and burnt. Nothing these late verses of the Letter introduce into the picture fits with the argument prepared so far.
Why has the Letter put the Crucifixion in this chronologically late and ritually subordinate position? The sacrifice of the animals must be of perfect and unblemished male parts (Lev 1.3, 10). The carcasses disposed of later are of unclean and unimportant remains. Jesus is the unblemished victim of the Letter (9.14). His death should be paired with the death of the unblemished animals, not with their unclean remains. What has led to the strange linking of the Crucifixion with the last and least treatment of the animal remains?
There can be only one reason. The author has seized on a superficial point—action “outside the camp,” to be paired with “outside Jerusalem” (for the Crucifixion)—and ignored all the other components of the larger argument. This is the very pattern Bourke and Johnson found elsewhere in the Letter. It also reflects the Letter’s tendency to use, forget, or distort Jewish cult when it serves any one of several different purposes.
Consider this, for instance: the bones and skin burnt outside the camp were not part of what was sacrificed. That was completed inside the camp, when the high priest took the fats and innards into the Holy of Holies to be offered to God. Many people make the false association that Ellingworth does: “The killing of animals outside the gate thus foreshadows the death of Jesus outside the walls.”15 The animals were not killed outside the walls, but in the outer Shrine, the Holy Place. But it is impossible to keep the parts of the comparison in any logical kind of alignment. As Hans-Josef Klauck notes:
The paradox of this work is that it uses a thoroughly cultic language to make a deeply uncultic statement…Death on the cross was basically a noncultic affair, despite all the cultic terms employed…In this noncultic place Jesus shed his redeeming and atoning blood for all.16
(d) “Go Outside” and (e) “Stay Outside”
In the next verse, the Letter says that, since Christ was taken outside the gate to be crucified, Christians should stay outside and not go back into the city. The author has already forgotten the reason animals were burnt outside the camp—because the camp is sacred ground and the carcasses are unclean. Though they could be slaughtered in the camp, their remains cannot be burnt there. Jesus, too, had to be crucified outside of Jerusalem, because Jerusalem is the holy city, and unholy acts like crucifixion should not take place there. But now the Letter is saying Christians should stay outside the sacred camp/city in that place of defilement!
Koester, oddly, says that “staying outside the city allows Christians to minister to strangers, the afflicted, and prisoners who live outside the mainstream of urban life” (K 571). He wants to equate the mainstream of urban life with secular authority, since he had earlier claimed that they were the ones who could not eat of the Christian sacrifice: “The principal threat came from government officials, not the Law” (K 570). But how could hostile officials be “officiators at the Shrine” (13.10)? This just shows how even as acute a student of the Letter as Koester can become confused in the whirl of contradictory leaps and doublings back in this passage.
He is not alone in this quandary. Ceslas Spicq says that the verse (9.13) calls on Christians to be voluntary exiles either from the pagan world or from the realm of Moses (2.427–28). Needless to say, the two are hardly identical, or even reconcilable. And how can the Letter be saying that Christians should have nothing to do with Moses when the high priesthood of Jesus is of the kind (though a superior kind) of sacrifice carried out by high priests following Mosaic Law?
F. F. Bruce sees the problem and then dodges it. He says the city is actually the sacred, the outside, the profane. Then why are the believers to stay out in the profane sphere?
Were they to leave the sacred precincts and to venture onto unhallowed ground? Yes, because in Jesus the old values had been reversed. What was formerly sacred was now unhallowed, because Jesus had been expelled from it; what was formerly unhallowed was now sacred, because Jesus was there.17
But Jesus does not stay at Calvary. He takes his offering up to heaven, what was symbolized by the Holy of Holies, by the inmost sacredness.
Paul Ellingworth comes close to just throwing up his hands and surrendering the effort to make sense of this conclusion to the whole puzzling sequence:
Problems arise when attempts are made to specify in greater detail the logical steps in the argument…On the one hand, it [verse 13.13] is understood as an exhortation to leave this world and seek Christian heaven (so Cambier, Nitsche). On the other hand, it is taken as an appeal to leave the cultic world for the secular (so, e.g., van der Bergh, van Eysingen, J. A. Sanders). Between these extremes, there are a variety of other explanations: the readers are to abandon Judaism; they are to “go out” in meditation to meet their Lord (Bruce); they are to leave worldly delights for asceticism; they are to flee the material for the spiritual (so Philo). The matter cannot be settled by appeal to the immediate context alone: verse 14 is quoted in support of an “otherworldly” interpretation, while verse 16 clearly suggests that the readers still have duties in this world. To understand this passage as an appeal to abandon Judaism for Christianity is foreign to the whole scope of the author’s thought, which moves consistently within the category of God’s twofold action on behalf of his one people. Obermueller rightly believes that the passage requires a double hermeneutic: liturgical and sociological; but this states the problem rather than solving it. The problem is not solved even by appeal to the context of the entire epistle, with its implied or expressed cosmology; first of all, because the author appears to work with two distinct cosmological schemes (Ellingworth); and secondly, more important, because the present “location” of Christians in any such scheme is by its very nature ambivalent and transitional.18
There is more of that to come, but it leaves the matter even muddier.
Some seem to think that a polished writer, which the author of Hebrews certainly is, must be a profound thinker. But over and over the jointures of this Letter will not bear close scrutiny. That will become even clearer when we look at the Letter’s doctrine on sacrifice.
NOTES