What Is the Purpose of the Epistle to the Hebrews? A History of Readings of the Interpretive Framework of Hebrews’ Theology
(2024) The Epistle to the Hebrews — ISBN: [978-90-429-5052-8], p. 3-28, published
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- Abstract
- In his presidential address, Régis Burnet reviews the history of readings of Hebrews in order to take stock of its exegesis. He shows the considerable influence of the interpreter’s decision regarding the author and the purpose of the Epistle. For a long time, the attribution of the Epistle to Paul led to it being regarded as a supersessionist document (“leaving Judaism” to found “Christianity”). With the abandonment of Pauline authorship, everyone was tempted to read into it the preoccupations of their own time: the danger of falling back into apostasy in the missionary discourses of the nineteenth century, the fear of moral decline in the 1920s, the metaphor of resistance to Nazism in Käsemann’s famous book Das wandernde Gottesvolk (1939). At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, a new way of looking at the text emerged. Recognition of the diversity of Judaism provided a solution to the problem of supersessionism, while the Epistle came increasingly to be seen as a literary, rhetorical text with a distinct theological voice.
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Citations
Burnet, R. (2024). What Is the Purpose of the Epistle to the Hebrews? A History of Readings of the Interpretive Framework of Hebrews’ Theology. In Burnet, Régis (ed.) (ed.), The Epistle to the Hebrews (p. p. 3-28). Peeters. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/235666