Through the many-sided experiences-within-community which we have noted in the foregoing chapters, the followers of Jesus came to conceive, articulate, communicate and develop their message. ‘Their’ message only in a paradoxical sense: for while they undoubtedly struggled towards understanding and articulating it, there was always a sense in which it was ‘given’ or a sense in which they were ‘led into truth’, for the object of their message transcended their full comprehension and ‘blicks’ or insights into reality came not by human contrivance but through openness to the transcendent. In the concrete reality of Jesus the Christ, the transcendent had been expressed in human terms, as ‘good news’ in word and action. The ‘word’ was largely the paradosis originating with Jesus, interpreting and interpreted by the word of scripture. The ‘action’ was many-stranded: the ‘action’ of the death of Jesus, of the resurrection experiences and the Spirit, of common meals and ‘remembering’, of searching the scripture, and of the koinonia as a whole. The proclamation of the Christ event as ‘good news’ was now to be accomplished in similar fashion, in word and action (cf. John 3:18).

The experience of the Christian koinonia has to be translated into intelligible terms for the purposes of edification (cf. 1 Cor. 14:1-19), evangelism and apologetic exposition (cf. Acts 2:14ff.).

Popular preaching in the Graeco-Roman world

With paraclesis, ‘exhortation’, and homilia, ‘familiar converse’, we enter the world of popular preaching. The hinterland of paraclesis is permeated with religious meaning: ‘comfort’, ‘consolation’, ‘asking for help’; and as ‘exhortation’ the word can denote both summons to decision and encouragement to persevere. The ethos of homilia, the term later applied to popular preaching, is one of intimacy and familiarity, of friendly converse and persuasive argumentation, with overtones of serious intent and instruction. The world of the first century was as open to moralistic discourse as the modern world is closed to it. The church began in a cultural environment in which preaching was a basic mode of communication.

Behind this cultural phenomenon stood centuries of development and preparation, the roots of which were embedded in the Greek situation bequeathed to posterity by Alexander. The soil was the international culture, based on Hellenism. Yet such hellenistic internationalism contained within itself immense tensions.

The problem of kerygma and didache

The dawn of modern, kerygmatic theology broke upon the slumbering world in 1892 with the publication of a work by Martin Kāhler which decisively challenged the historical relativism of the nineteenth-century ‘lives of Jesus’ and redirected attention to the Christ of the apostolic preaching. ‘The real Christ is the preached Christ, and the preached Christ is the Christ of faith.’ The high noon of the movement was marked by the ascendancy of Barth and Bultmann, blood brothers of the form-geschichtliche Schule but diverging sharply, as brothers sometimes do, in the very manner in which they developed their inheritance. The post-Bultmannians still walk in the afternoon sunlight of kerygmatic theology, even if the lengthening shadows suggest that the darkness of the night will not be postponed indefinitely. The twentieth-century day, thus illumined by the sunlight of the kerygma, has had its own share of diurnal difficulties, many of them still unresolved as the working day draws towards its close, but it has always claimed the advantage of locating clearly the genuine source of light and power: the kerygma, the preaching which has characterised and enshrined the Christian faith from the beginning. Yet this basic nuclear concept presents a concatenation of problems, a further examination of which is essential to any appreciation in depth of the nature of Christian utterance.

The phenomenon of prophecy

To study the fascinating variety and richness of the prophetic traditions - from Zoroaster, the archetypal prophet of the Iranian tradition, to Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, and from the Hebrew nabV to the oracle prophets of Delphi or Dodona - would involve a lengthy digression at this point. Let it suffice to note that the precise meaning of the term ‘prophet’ is determined by the context and tradition in which it operates. No two prophetic traditions were more unlike than those of Greece and Israel, yet some degree of linguistic compatibility was eventually arrived at. When Alexander had effected the marriage of East and West, and Hellenism had invaded the jealously guarded precincts of Judaism, the question of the appropriateness of the Greek word prophētēs as a translation of nabi′was settled by the practice of the translators of the Septuagint, who made precisely this identification. No doubt they found the flexibility of the Greek term something of an asset.

Whatever cultural cross-fertilisation took place at certain points, the basic forms of Christian propheteia inevitably derived in the main from the prophetic tradition of Israel.

Tradition in the hellenistic world

Greek culture differs from Hebrew in that it has no overriding concern with a paramount revelation given and received historically. Tradition nevertheless operates within the culture in relation to ancient epic and gnomic poetry and is held to be an essential part of moral education. After the pupil had mastered the alphabet and could understand the written word, he was confronted by ‘the works of good poets to read’ and compelled to learn them by heart with a view to moral improvement. His teacher chose ‘such poems as contain moral admonitions, and many a narrative interwoven with praise and panegyric on the worthies of old, in order that the boy may admire and emulate and strive to become such himself. Rote learning was the basic way of receiving and absorbing such tradition, which was presumed to have important implications for moral improvement. Nicerates is reported as saying: ‘my father, designing to make a virtuous man of me, ordered me to get by heart every verse of Homer; and I believe I can repeat to you at this minute the whole Iliad and Odyssey’.

The ensuing work represents the modification of a dissertation presented to the University of Cambridge in 1971 for the degree of Ph.D. The revision has been made after a number of years in a small but lively country parish in New Zealand, so that in some sense it gathers up three stages of activity: the original exegetical labour, practical Christian involvement, and further theological reflection.

Presumably every author senses the limitations of his work as he is about to send it off to be fixed in print. That is especially so in this case. Up until my appointment as a lecturer in biblical studies (subsequent to the completion of the typescript for this book) I had always regarded myself essentially as a practising parish minister who had had some lucky breaks in which to indulge in his favourite hobby! That meant, however, a sense of being exposed on several flanks. The suggestions of the fourth chapter, which really required an expertise in church history, philosophy and linguistic theory, as well as some knowledge of the bible and theology, have been made especially tentatively.

At every stage of the work I have incurred a deep indebtedness to many people. As do all his students, I owe to Professor C. F. D. Moule an especial tribute for his insights and skill in the supervision of the original work.

The Son as the new form of God's ‘Address’

There are few more striking or more carefully written sentences in the New Testament than that with which the Epistle to the Hebrews begins. These succinct, economical words describing God's self-disclosure through many generations but as having now taken place finally and fully in the person of his Son, are regularly referred to as a model statement of this Christian conception of revelation. And yet it is precisely the care with which the sentence has been put together which raises certain difficulties about it. For such a carefully written statement asks that care is taken that it be understood. But herein is our problem. For not only does the all-but-explicit ‘Logos-doctrine’ appear quite unrelated, either literally or theologically, to the highpriestly Christology – or for that matter to any of the other major Christological expressions of the letter – but where the term ‘Word of God’ does appear it bears no obviously Christological significance.

We might be excused, therefore, in regarding it as a polished but essentially unrelated headpiece to the body of the work. But in this case the question may be asked whether we have fulfilled our responsibility to understand the statement or whether we have not simply abdicated from it.

Our investigation, as has been hinted, must run at two levels. We must attempt in the first place to understand the literary connections which run between the prologue and the body of the letter.

The inclination to introduce any study on the Epistle to the Hebrews by remarking in some way or another on the enigma which attends this important letter of our New Testament canon seems almost irresistible. The tendency is not difficult to account for. On one hand the letter's significance as an early source for, and continuing influence upon, the devotional piety and understanding of Christians is unquestionable. Attention is frequently drawn, for instance, to its important statements about the nature of worship. It is the source of profoundly important Christian conceptions such as the highpriesthood of Christ, or of Christian life as an ongoing pilgrimage. Over many centuries Christian theologians have allowed themselves to be guided in Christological explorations by the heavy emphases the letter places on both the humanity of Jesus and also his dignity as Son of God. Some passages, for example the ‘definition of faith’ at the head of chapter 11 or the carefully written opening statement about the Word of God which culminates in Jesus the Son, have regularly served as models for the expression of these ideas.

But on the whole these contributions made by the unknown author of our letter function in isolation from their context. As a document, the letter attracts only minimal attention either from scholars, or from those who read for more devotional or homiletical purposes.

The most immediately obvious expression of the hermeneutical question lying behind the epistle is contained in the use made by the writer of the Old Testament in his quotations. That is why almost invariably studies of the hermeneutical principles of the author have been confined to this particular field of investigation.

Attention has regularly been given to the singularly dynamic way in which the scriptures function for this Christian writer: ‘When he uses any word to introduce a quotation he employs words expressing diction … The present tense is preferred to the past tense, active forms to passive.’ ‘What has been said is also being said.’ In fact this observation simply raises in an especially clear and precise form the dialectic which we have said is the distinguishing mark of the relationship between the covenants. In this particular case the question takes the form: how in one context can the scriptures of the Old Testament function so immediately as a vehicle for the Word of God while in other contexts the covenant which those same scriptures enshrine is unceremoniously dismissed as outmoded?

It is true that we have to do here with the web of problems raised by the writer's citations from, and exegesis of, the Old Testament.

The question to which at last we are directed by our study of the interpretative procedures of this first-century Christian is whether what we have found in his work has any point of helpfulness for contemporary hermeneutical reflection. Immediately quite natural doubts present themselves – raised by our deep awareness of the gulf created by the centuries of terminological and conceptual refinement which separate his times from ours. That, as is stated often enough, is the hermeneutical problem.

And yet, to be daunted by those doubts, in the first instance at any rate, would entail a certain irony. For what we have been investigating is the work of a man who has apparently accomplished with some success precisely that from before which we were ourselves in resignation. For the distances, temporally and culturally, between this author and the subject matter of his interpretation (the Old Testament rituals) can hardly be regarded as inconsiderable either; yet obviously he has not been dissuaded by that fact. That is not to exclude the possibility, of course, that in the end we might have to admit that the distances between us are too great for there to be more than tangential similarities between his questions and answers and ours.