Introduction

An Apostle Writing to a People Who Hated Him

Theophylact treats the Epistle to the Hebrews, as the Church has always received it, as the work of the Apostle Paul, and he opens his commentary by explaining why a letter to the Hebrews should come at all from a man sent, by his own account in Romans, as apostle to the Gentiles. The Jews of Palestine, Theophylact writes, hated Paul more bitterly than they hated the other apostles, precisely because his own sudden conversion—the fiercest persecutor of the Church becoming its most tireless preacher—was living proof of the power of the very Christ he had once opposed. Even the Hebrews who had come to believe gave him little hearing, since he was understood to be leading believers away from the law and abolishing circumcision entirely. And yet, Theophylact reasons, just as Paul had not been formally commanded to baptize and yet baptized regardless, so out of the abundance of his love he wrote to the Hebrews as well, though his commission lay elsewhere—caring for them so much, Theophylact recalls, that Paul had once prayed to become “anathema” for their sake.

The recipients, Theophylact specifies, were the believing Hebrews of Palestine and Jerusalem—men and women who had had their goods seized by their own unbelieving countrymen and had suffered “countless ill-treatments” at the hands of a community that still, under Roman rule, retained real power to bind and to imprison whom it pleased. Paul writes, Theophylact says, to console a people worn down by persecution from their own house and tempted to fall away from a faith that had cost them so much, urging them to bear nobly what has befallen them and to trust that God does not overlook those who have suffered for him. He places the letter’s composition in Italy, and—reasoning from Paul’s own remarks about Timothy’s release, set against the very different tone of Second Timothy, written when Paul knew his death was near—judges Hebrews the earlier of the two, written while Paul still hoped to see his Hebrew readers again in person.

The Old Made New

The letter’s argument, as Theophylact reads it, is a sustained demonstration that the New Covenant surpasses the Old—not by rejecting what came before, but by showing it to have been provisional from the start, a shadow awaiting its substance. Even while the Jerusalem temple still stood, he notes, the Apostle was already showing that its worship could last only for a time, and that the realities belonging to the New Covenant are the true and lasting ones. Much of the letter’s early argument, in his reading, moves through comparison: the Son is shown to surpass the angels through whom the Old Covenant had come, and Moses himself, faithful as a servant in God’s house, gives way to Christ, who is faithful as a son set over the house itself.

Melchizedek and the Priesthood That Has No End

The argument reaches its most searching point in the seventh chapter, where the Apostle takes up the obscure figure of Melchizedek, the king of Salem who blessed Abraham and received a tithe from him (Heb. 7:1–2). Theophylact reads the encounter as proof, established from Scripture’s own silence, that Melchizedek’s priesthood surpasses the priesthood descended from Abraham through Levi—for the one who blesses and receives tithes is shown thereby to be the greater, and if Melchizedek, a mere type of Christ, outranks the patriarch of Israel, how much more does Christ himself, the true reality that Melchizedek only foreshadowed. Theophylact works out the typology name by name: “Melchizedek” itself means “king of righteousness”, and “Salem” means “peace”, so that a king who is both righteous and peaceable answers to no one but Christ.

The most demanding verse of the chapter calls Melchizedek “without father, without mother, without genealogy” (Heb. 7:3), and Theophylact takes care to distinguish what is truly said of Christ from what is said of Melchizedek only in a manner of speaking. Melchizedek was a man like any other, with parents of his own; Scripture calls him fatherless and motherless only because his genealogy is nowhere recorded, and his lineage passes over the sacred text in silence. Christ alone answers to the description in the fullest and most literal sense—without a father according to his birth in the flesh, since he was born of the Virgin Mary alone, and without a mother according to his birth from eternity, begotten of the Father alone before all ages, in a manner that no human reason can trace or declare. What is said of Melchizedek by the silence of a text, Theophylact insists, is true of Christ by the very nature of his generation.

One Sacrifice, Offered Once

The letter’s central theological claim, developed at length in its ninth and tenth chapters, is that Christ’s priesthood required no repetition. The priests of the Old Covenant, Theophylact observes, “stood daily ministering”, offering the same sacrifices again and again precisely because those sacrifices could never truly take away sin; Christ, by contrast, “having offered one sacrifice for sins forever”, “sat down at the right hand of the Father” (Heb. 10:11–12)—and Theophylact reads the posture itself as doctrine: to stand is the mark of one still ministering, but to sit is the mark of one already served, so that in sitting down Christ shows himself to be a High Priest offering a sacrifice and God himself, receiving what has been accomplished. Theophylact explains the timing of the sacrifice as carefully as its singularity: Christ was manifested only “at the consummation of the ages”, after sin had multiplied through the long history of the Old Covenant, so that his one death might answer the full weight of human sin at once, rather than requiring—as an earlier death would have—a repetition without end.

How to Read This Commentary

Hebrews is dense with Old Testament imagery—priesthood, tabernacle, covenant, sacrifice—and Theophylact’s commentary is correspondingly the most sustained argument in his New Testament work, moving patiently through each figure and showing how it points beyond itself to Christ. A reader new to the letter will find it easiest to keep two questions in view throughout: what does this passage show about the surpassing worth of Christ, and how does it console a people tempted to give up under pressure? Both questions run through the whole letter together, since for Theophylact the doctrine of Christ’s unrepeatable priesthood is never abstract—it is offered, from the first chapter to the last, as the ground on which suffering believers could stand without flinching, certain that what Christ accomplished once needed, and could need, no second offering.