Textual CriticismAnswered

Do you believe St. Paul wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews?

A viewer asks whether St. Paul is the author of Hebrews or whether that is unlikely.

Answer

Yes, I do believe St. Paul is the author of Hebrews. I put that in my book Not by Faith Alone, published in 1997. The Council of Florence, around 1440, gave us the closest thing to an infallible canon before the Council of Trent, and it said the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by St. Paul. As a new Catholic I figured everyone would go by that, since it is the same canon of Scripture that Trent later made infallible. But the modernist Catholics are of a different breed: whatever the liberal Protestants tell them about the Bible, the liberal Catholics believe, and one of those things is that St. Paul did not write Hebrews. In the end it really does not matter, because whoever wrote it was inspired by the Holy Spirit; according to Vatican I and Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus, God chose the words. Unless you are doing a study on the style of the writer, it does not affect the inspiration. But I was chastised severely for saying Paul wrote Hebrews, which tells you that you have to join the modernist club to have your work accepted.

Dr. Robert Sungenis

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