HKB
the New Testament resisted. At last the Alexandrian view won universal acceptance. The Epistle to the Hebrews became an accepted part of the New Testament, and was attributed to Paul.
Clement of Alexandria, who had apparently received the tradition of Pauline authorship from Pantænus, his predecessor, himself declares that Hebrews was written by Paul in the "Hebrew" (Aramaic) language, and was translated by Luke into Greek. The notion of a translation by Luke was based upon no genuine historical tradition--Hebrews is certainly an original Greek work--but was simply an hypothesis constructed to explain the peculiarities of the epistle on the supposition that it was a work of Paul.
(=2=) =The Value of the Tradition.=--The tradition of Pauline authorship is clearly very weak. If Paul had been the author, it is hard to see why the memory of the fact should have been lost so generally in the Church. No one in the early period had any objection to the epistle; on the contrary it was very highly regarded. If, then, it had really been written by Paul, the Pauline authorship would have been accepted everywhere with avidity. The negative testimony of the Roman church is particularly significant. The epistle was quoted by Clement of Rome at about A. D. 95; yet at Rome as elsewhere in the West the epistle seems never in the early period to have been regarded as Pauline. In other words, just where acquaintance with the epistle can be traced farthest back, the denial of Pauline authorship seems to have been most insistent. If Clement of Rome had regarded Paul as the author, the history of Roman opinion about the epistle would have been very different.
On the other hand, on the supposition that there was originally no tradition of Pauline authorship, the subsequent prevalence of such a tradition is easily explained. It was due simply to the evident apostolic authority of the epistle itself. From the start, Hebrews was felt to be an authoritative work. Being authoritative, it would be collected along with other authoritative works. Since it was an epistle, and exhibited a certain Pauline quality of spirit and subject, it would naturally be associated with the other works of the greatest letter writer of the apostolic age. Being thus included in a collection of the Pauline Epistles, and being regarded as of apostolic authority, what was more natural than to attribute it to the apostle Paul? Such, very possibly, was the origin of the Alexandrian tradition.
This tradition did not win immediate acceptance, because the rest of the Church was still aware that the epistle was not written by Paul. What led to the final conquest of the Pauline tradition was simply the character of the book itself. The question of Pauline authorship, in the case of this book, became connected with the question of apostolic authority. The Church had to choose between rejecting the book altogether, and accepting it as Pauline. When she finally adopted the latter alternative, undoubtedly she chose the lesser error. It was an error to regard the epistle as the work of Paul; but it would have been a far greater error to exclude it from the New Testament. As a matter of fact, though the book was not written by Paul, it was written, if not by one of the other apostles, at least by an "apostolic man" like Mark or Luke. Scarcely any book of the New Testament bears clearer marks of true apostolicity.