Hebrews 3:1

Ὅθεν, “wherefore,” if through Jesus God has spoken His final and saving word (Hebrews 1:1), thus becoming the Apostle of God, and if the high priest I speak of is so sympathetic and faithful that for the sake of cleansing the people He became man and suffered, then “consider, etc.”. The πιστός of Hebrews 3:17 strikes the keynote of this paragraph. Here for the first time the writer designates his readers, and he does so in a form peculiar to himself (the reading in 1 Thessalonians 5:27 being doubtful) ἀδελφοὶ ἅγιοι, “Christian brethren,” literally “brethren consecrated,” separated from the world and dedicated to God. Bleek quotes from Primasius: “Fratres eos vocat tam carne quam spiritu qui ex eodem genere erant”. But there is no reason to assign to ἀδελφοὶ any other meaning than its usual N.T. sense of “fellow-Christians,” cf. Matthew 23:8. But there is further significance in the additional κλήσεως ἐπουρανίου μέτοχοι, “partakers of a heavenly calling” (cf. οἱ κεκλημένοι τῆς αἰωνίου κληρονομίας, Hebrews 9:15) suggested by the latent comparison in the writer's mind between the Israelites called to earthly advantages, a land, etc., and his readers whose hopes were fixed on things above. “In the word ‘heavenly' there is struck for the first time, in words at least, an antithesis of great importance in the Epistle, that of this world and heaven, in other words, that of the merely material and transient, and the ideal and abiding. The things of the world are material, unreal, transient: those of heaven are ideal, true, eternal. Heaven is the world of realities, of things themselves (Hebrews 9:23) of which the things here are but ‘copies' ” (Davidson). κατανοήσατε, “consider,” “bring your mind to bear upon,” “observe so as to see the significance,” as in Luke 12:24, κατανοήσατε τοὺς κόρακας, though it is sometimes, as in Acts 11:6; Acts 27:39, used in its classical sense “perceive”. A “confession” does not always involve that its significance is seen. Consider then τὸν … Ἰησοῦν “the Apostle and high priest of our confession, Jesus,” the single article brackets the two designations and Bengel gives their sense: “ τὸν ἀποστ. eum qui Dei causam apud nos agit. τὸν ἀρχ. qui causam nostram apud Deum agit”. These two functions embrace not the whole of Christ's work, but all that He did on earth (cf. Hebrews 1:1-4). The frequent use of ἀποστέλλειν by our Lord to denote the Father's mission of the Son authorises the present application of ἀπόστολος. It is through Him God has spoken (Hebrews 1:1). Moses is never called ἀπόστολος (a word indeed which occurs only once in LXX) though in Exodus 3:10 God says ἀποστείλω σε πρὸς φαραώ. Schoettgen quotes passages from the Talmud in which the high priest is termed the Apostle or messenger of God and of the Sanhedrim, but this is here irrelevant. καὶ ἀρχιερέα, a title which, as applicable to Jesus, the writer explains in chaps. 5 8. τῆς ὁμολογίας ἡμῶν, “of our confession,” or, whom we, in distinction from men of other faiths, confess; chiefly no doubt in distinction from the non-Christian Jews. ὁμολογία, as the etymology shows, means “of one speech with,” hence that in which men agree as their common creed, their confession, see ref. As Peake remarks: “If this means profession of faith, then ‘the readers already confess Jesus as high priest, and this is not a truth taught them in this Epistle for the first time'.” [Carpzov quotes from Philo (De Somn.): ὁ μὲν δὴ μέγας Ἀρχιερεὺς τῆς ὁμολογίας, but here another sense is intended.] Ἰησοῦν is added to preclude the possibility of error. Ἰησοῦς occurs in this Epistle nine times by itself, thrice with Χριστός.