Recently, Félix Cortez published an article on the Spectrum website arguing that Paul the apostle was the author of the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament. This essay, published weekly in four parts, is a review of that paper and its evidence and findings, a response to the elements of his case, and a summary of my own views on the issue.
Thank you very much ! Eagerly I am looking forwards to following next parts !!!
In the past, the authorship of the lessons in the SS Quarterly were identified by naming the “author.” At that time, some of the authors did not recognize the printed lessons as what they had written. I guess that many of them complained rather strongly to the staff of the Sabbath School Department of the General Conference which edited the manuscripts for publication. Again, just guessing, I imagine that as a results of these complains the staff decided to identify the authors of the lessons as “principal contributors.” The Spanish version of the Quarterlies, however, still uses the descriptor “autor.”
A few days ago, talking with Felix Cortez I asked him whether he had recognized the printed version of the manuscript he had sent to the SS Department. He answered saying that they had not made many changes to the manuscript. One of them, however, was that he had written consistently “the author of Hebrews.” The editors had changed that to “Paul.”
Before talking with Felix I had noticed that at first the printed Quarterly does read “the author of Hebrews,” and I was surprised and glad to see that. Soon, however, I noticed that the author was identified as “Paul.” Apparently the staff at the SS Department did not catch on to the issue at first.
Thank you very much for that very important information !! There are quite a number of oddities in SSQ during the lst - let me say - ten years and now youstimulate a necessary excuse for the authors, showing that they are not bearing the final responsibility for poor scholraship !
I, too, have experienced significant editorial alteration of an SSQ manuscript, even when the final edition made no sense. I am not surprised to learn second hand that this happened to Cortez’s material on Hebrews. However, my essay is not a review of his SS quarterly, original or edited. It is a response to his published article on this site, where he seeks to argue cases against the prevailing view on authorship and for authorship by Paul or one of his associates. Lest there be any doubt where he (not the editors of the SSQ or of the Spectrum website) stands on the issue, he concludes, “I believe it is likely that Paul wrote Hebrews.”
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