Welcome from Mid-America Reformed Seminary, this is Marscast and I'm your host Jared Luchobor. Dr. Marcus Minninger, professor of New Testament Studies, joins us in the studio today looking at the fascinating world of biblical interpretation, specifically examining preterist interpretations of the book of Hebrews. His discussion centers around a key question that has intrigued scholars for centuries. Was the book of Hebrews written before or after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD? But perhaps more importantly, he'll explore whether this dating question is as crucial to understanding Hebrews as some might think. Dr. Mininger begins by examining evidence of Roman persecution in the early church and what it might tell us about when Hebrews was written. Here's Dr. Mininger. Well, today we're going to talk about a topic that might be a little out of left field for some of you, but very familiar to others, and that is the question of preterist interpretation, particularly preterist interpretation of the book of Hebrews. And the book of Hebrews is a really fascinating document, especially for how careful it is and almost quasi-philosophical at times. It really reflects deeply on issues of worldview, Christian worldview, makes very nuanced, careful distinctions. And so it's a wonderful book to test out a lot of different interpretive or theological theories or viewpoints. Some other time in another setting, you know, you can think about dispensationalism and then look at Hebrews and work through that and how does it sit with Hebrews. Theonomy, republication of the covenant of works in a different direction. You can think about the new perspective and how does Hebrews interact with that. Or Roman Catholic views of worship and priesthood and sacrifice and so forth would, many, many structures of thought. really are challenged by the book of Hebrews. So against that background we can think about preterism itself. Now, what is preterism? Preterism is a way of interpreting that says what a text of scripture is describing, especially in the context of any prophecies, but what a text of scripture is describing is something that's now already passed, not something already still to come in the future from the vantage point of that text itself. And so Preterist interpretation of the book of Hebrews especially revolves around the question of whether Hebrews was written before or after a particular event that is now passed for us. that event being the event of the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 AD. So was the book of Hebrews written before or after 70 AD and that event? Another way of saying that is, is that event of 70 AD where the Jerusalem temple with its sacrificial services existed, was that temple still existing when Hebrews was written, or was that temple already destroyed when Hebrews was written? And that's kind of the question. Now, predecessor interpretation applies to other books of the New Testament as well. And certainly, at times, this question of, is a given passage or book referring ahead of time to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD, certainly many times that question is very important and very relevant. We can think about Jesus' Olivet Discourse in the Gospels. He's clearly looking ahead to and predicting the destruction of the temple, and so that event is quite important there. The question then becomes, how often is 70 AD, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, a key issue for a given text of scripture? And then here we're gonna say, how important is it or is it not for the book of Hebrews? Was Hebrews written before or after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD? And then we're going to ask along with that, does it really matter or how much does it matter? So essentially we're going to get to two questions. One is what can we say about this topic? Is the, does the evidence show that Hebrews was written before or after 70 AD? We'll look at the evidence. But the bigger question to me is how do we know if that first question is a good question for Hebrews? In other words, how do we know how much it really does matter? Oftentimes when we ask questions of scripture, we ask them for various reasons. Those questions are on our mind for various reasons. And so then we bring that question and we pose it to the text and we look at it and then we get an answer or think we get an answer. But we don't often step back and say, Was my question actually a good question for the text of scripture that I'm reading? And so we want to ask that as well. We can ask, does the evidence show Hebrews was written before or after 70 AD? But we should also ask, does the evidence in Hebrews show that this is, in fact, an important issue for Hebrews, or is it perhaps a bit beside the point for Hebrews one way or the other, and I'm going to suggest that in certain respects it is in fact beside the point, or not to the core of the issues that Hebrews wants to address. This is something I hope will be useful exercise as it's an example of how we can and should test our interpretive theories and test our interpretive questions with humility, not just assume that our questions are always great ones. But when we ask a question before or after 70 AD, we're essentially posing two options, right? It's written, the 60s or 50s or something like that or it's written later in the late 70s 80s whatever it might be but we're giving two options before or after we're not directly entertaining the the other additional question does it really matter so to be honest it's really that second question that I think is more interesting and so if you find the details regarding the before or after 70 question cumbersome stick with me and we'll try to show the payoff as we go So before or after 70 AD, there are two main issues with the book of Hebrews that come up here, and we'll talk about one of them this episode and another one in a future episode, Lord willing. And the two issues are, firstly, the question of Roman persecution. When did Roman persecutions happen? and how does that help us date the book of Hebrews? We're talking then, it's important to be clear about official Roman persecution, an official Roman persecution of Christians as Christians, meaning that Roman officials would purposefully be imprisoning or otherwise persecuting Christians knowing that they are Christians, or that being the reason that they're doing that. The evidence in Hebrews, the reason why we ask this question, is because Hebrews clearly shows that its audience had experienced Roman persecution earlier, before the letter was written, and it also suggests that the audience is facing the distinct likelihood of experiencing it again. So the audience seems to be positioned between two events of persecution. One somewhat distant in the past, and one expected to come soon. And we can look at the record historically and say, okay, well, then when might that be in the first century that the situation would have been of that sort? Hebrews 10, 32 and following says this. It asks the audience to which Hebrews is written to reflect back on an event, a painful event that is now some time past. an event of persecution. It says, recall the former days when after you were enlightened, which is another way of saying after you became Christians, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated, For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward, for you have need of endurance. So this clearly shows that the audience of Hebrews had experienced official Roman persecution sometime in the past, right soon after they became Christians. And we say that it's Roman persecution for a couple reasons. It's not simply, say, Jewish persecution. for a couple reasons. One is that it involves not only imprisonment, but also the possibility of death. The second one seems clear from Hebrews 12 verse 4, where it tells the audience that at the time of the documents being written, it says, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood, which suggests that shedding your blood, or in other words being a martyr, is a distinct possibility for them, though it hasn't yet occurred. So Jews were able, they did have a limited authority to imprison people for the sake of religious trials. We see them taking custody of people in different ways in the New Testament. but they did not have the authority to execute. And so because the persecutions that this audience faces involved plundering of possessions, imprisonment, and the distinct possibility of becoming a martyr, or being killed in other words, it seems likely then that it is Roman persecution that they're facing. official Roman persecution of them as Christians following their having converted to Christianity. The second thing, the reason why we say it's Roman persecution is all the emphasis in the book of Hebrews seems to be on the audiences being tempted to go back to the Old Covenant viewed as a very positive thing. The Old Covenant, of course, associated with the Jewish people And so a non-Christian Jewish vantage point or belief system, to put it that way, meaning Jews who don't accept the New Covenant, their viewpoint seems to be attracting or alluring this audience to consider going back to it, back to the synagogue, we might say. So the synagogue, so to speak, appears more like something appealing to this audience instead of something threatening to this audience, which is another reason it seems like this audience is facing Roman persecution, not Jewish persecution. So, just to lay that out then, the basic evidence shows that the audience sits between two events of persecution, one more distantly past, the other impending, seems to be coming soon, and they've not yet, any of them, been killed for their faith, but they are being persecuted for their faith, and they're being persecuted for their faith by Rome itself. Well, if that's true, then we can look at the historical record about the first century and begin to situate this book within that or see what we can learn. What is known about official Roman persecution of Christians can help us sketch out when this book might have been written given what we've just seen in the book itself. Now, we have to remember here that official Roman persecution of Christians in the 1st century was not constant. It was fairly sporadic. It increased a lot more towards the end of the 1st century, but throughout most of the 1st century, Roman officials were not persecuting Christians as Christians, knowledgeably, In other words, due to their being Christians, partly because for quite a bit of the first century, Roman officials don't seem to really know what Christians are or be able to distinguish Christians on the one hand from non-Christian Jews on the other. They all just seem to be the same group. So, for example, we can look in Acts and early on we do see in Acts chapter 12 that Herod Agrippa I persecuted some of the Christians. We note that he laid violent hands on James and then he imprisoned Peter. And so this in one sense is official Roman persecution because Herod Agrippa was a Roman official, but in another sense this is quite anomalous because this particular Roman official happens to himself be partly Jewish and understand and know about the beliefs of the Jewish people much more than a typical Roman official. Also, this of course happened in Palestine, where Jews were in a majority of sections of Palestine. And so, in those ways too, it's an anomalous situation. It doesn't tell us what's going on in the empire in general. When we read later than that in Acts, what we see as Paul goes out on his missionary journeys and goes to various Roman cities, we see imprisonments by the hand of Roman officials, but usually those are brief and they're due to other reasons. They're simply due to the fact that there was a crowd disturbance around Paul and his message, and Roman officials didn't like crowd disturbances, but they don't understand what Paul's actually teaching. or what it means to be a Christian. They're not after Paul, they're not seeking him, they're just responding to the fact that there was some kind of crowd disturbance. Later in Acts, as Paul's trial begins, we see him stand before different Roman governing officials and it becomes quite clear that those officials have no ability to distinguish between Jews in general and Christians in particular. And Paul sort of plays off of that and utilizes that fact that they're unclear about that by essentially using some of the debates between Pharisees and Sadducees and And the Roman officials, like Felix and Festus, simply basically conclude, hey, this all sounds like an intramural Jewish debate to us. You Jews, all of you, should just figure out your own questions about your own customs and your own laws. together. In other words, they can't really tell that Paul is something different than any of the other Jews in front of them. Christians as Christians isn't even really a category that they understand in those early decades. So Roman officials persecuting Christians knowing that and because they are Christians and have professed faith in Christ is something that only comes later. More evidence in that regard may come in the year 49 AD, the time of Emperor Claudius' reign in Rome as Roman Emperor. It's debated, but there's something called the Edict of Claudius issued in 49, and the Edict of Claudius expelled all Jews from the city of Rome for a time. And it says, because of a disruption that was caused at the instigation of Crestus. Historians have argued about whether Crestus is actually a kind of garbled reference, in other words, showing Claudius' misunderstanding somewhat, but a garbled reference to Christ that Jews were debating about and having a conflict over Christ. But the point for us now is that if that is true, The expulsion of Jews from Rome would show that Claudius didn't understand the difference between Jews and Christians. Seeing this debate over Christ, if that is what it is, he just expelled all the Jews from Rome because, again, he just thought it was an intramural Jewish debate without understanding any difference between Jews and Christians at all. So again, at that point in time, so far as we can tell, 49 AD, the Romans wouldn't be persecuting Christians as Christians because they don't know what those are particularly. As we move on from there then, the next point of information that we see very clearly is a huge leap forward in the year 64. when Emperor Nero prosecuted what was really the first known and very bloody persecution of Christians, knowing that they are Christians. In other words, he targeted them as scapegoats. It wasn't really so much concern that they were Christians, but because they were Christians, they were easy to blame. And for Nero to be able to get sort of a convenient political scapegoat for the fire that he had set in Rome, And I'm sure that most of our audience is familiar with that. But 64 then would be the first clear time when Roman officials are purposefully persecuting and targeting Christians for persecution. But of course, 64 is also clearly a time when those Christians were not just being persecuted in a more mild way, but they were dying for their faith. In other words, their blood was being shed. And so we could go on from there to talk about other official persecutions later under Emperor Domitian and so forth. But for our purposes here, this rudimentary sketch begins to suggest that if our audience had been persecuted in a mild way, but had not yet been persecuted to the point of martyrdom, then it's likely that our audience sat sometime between 49 AD, when the emperor didn't have any idea who Christians were, and 64 AD, when the later emperor directly persecuted Christians, but to the point of killing them. And so we might think that some time in the mid to late 50s, perhaps the early 60s, would be a time in which we might situate the book of Hebrews, at least just based on evidence regarding official Roman persecution. Now, we have to, when we say that, just to qualify a bit, say this is still fairly speculative for a few reasons. In other words, this evidence tentatively suggests that Hebrews may have been written in the late 50s or early 60s. but it doesn't clearly prove that for a few reasons. First of all, there are legitimate questions regarding where this particular audience, the audience to which Hebrews was written, where they were located. The evidence in chapter 13 does suggest that they live somewhere in Italy. That is a bit of an inference, but it's a pretty strong inference that they lived in Italy. But just because they lived in Italy doesn't mean they lived in Rome. And what we do know about persecutions in 49 and 64 concerns the city of Rome. So we don't know as much about what was happening elsewhere in Italy, so we can't be entirely sure if that information about Claudius and Nero is directly applicable to this particular audience or not. What we're saying then is our record here is fragmentary, and so we could sketch out a plausible answer to our question that Hebrews may well be written in the late 50s or early 60s, but we certainly can't say that with certainty. Next time, we'll talk about some other evidence in Hebrews, particularly related to whether Hebrews shows that the temple in Jerusalem was still operating, still offering sacrifices at the time when the book was written or not. And then after that, we'll kind of step back and analyze what we learned on these two big topics relating to the letter's date. And then how much do we know, but also is this issue of before 70 AD or after 70 AD really that important? That's all for this episode of Marscast. We've explored how patterns of Roman persecution in the early church might help us date the book of Hebrews, suggesting it may have been written in the late 50s or early 60s AD. But there's more to this story. Join Dr. Menninger next time as he examines another piece of evidence, the temple sacrificial system. He'll look at key passages in Hebrews that might tell us whether the Jerusalem temple was still standing when the book was written. Does the author's use of present tense verbs give us clues about the dating? Find out in Part 2 of our series on Dating the Book of Hebrews. This has been Marscast from MidAmerica Reformed Seminary. I'm Jared Luchibor, signing off for now. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.