Speaking of Christ, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews testifies that in His person God takes on not angels, but the "descendants of Abraham," meaning first, human nature, and second, the tradition of revelation that stands behind Abraham and is linked with his name...
Speaking of Christ, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews testifies that in His person God takes on not angels, but the "descendants of Abraham," meaning first, human nature, and second, the tradition of revelation that stands behind Abraham and is linked with his name.
This statement was very important and timely. The Epistle to the Hebrews was written, perhaps by one of the disciples of the apostle Paul, soon after 70 AD, after the anti-Roman uprising in Judea that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. That uprising took place under messianic slogans, and its defeat marked the beginning of the end of political messianism.
Mystical messianism quickly replaced political messianism: if before many saw in the Messiah above all a righteous Ruler who would head the earthly Kingdom, now they began to see in Him some utterly unearthly, purely spiritual being, more like an angel than a man. Against the background of these views, which were spreading quickly in circles around the Church, the reminder that Christ is not an angel and not a bodiless spirit, but a real, living man of flesh and blood, though with humanity transformed by the action of the Spirit of God, was more than timely.
No less timely was another reminder: that Christian, New Testament revelation is linked with the tradition of another revelation that preceded it, a revelation going back to Abraham. By the end of the first century AD, generations were already entering the Church who knew little or nothing of the synagogue tradition, and the catastrophe of 70 further widened the break between the Church and the Synagogue, gradually pushing the Judeo-Christianity traditional for the first two Christian generations to the margins of church life.
Of course, Judaism as such was foreign to new Christians who had not known synagogue life, and in itself they did not need it. Yet it often turned out that, together with Judaism, these new Christians also lost that Yahwistic tradition, the tradition of revelation that goes back through the later prophets and Moses to Abraham, without which Christianity hung in empty space, outside history and outside tradition.
From there it was only one step to supposing that the Messiah was not a man at all, but someone like an angel, who could have no earthly history and with whom no tradition could be connected. The result of such logic was the conviction that Christianity is, in fact, a teaching not about the incarnation of God, but about the disincarnation of man. Instead of the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that the real, living Jesus promises His disciples, such "Christianity" could offer its followers only a pale shadow of life in a half-illusory likeness of the Kingdom.
2 In this and the two following chapters the apostle sub - joins an exhortation, answering each head of the preceding chapter.
2:16 For verily he taketh not hold of angels - He does not take their nature upon him. But he taketh hold of the seed of Abraham - He takes human nature upon him. St. Paul says the seed of Abraham, rather than the seed of Adam, because to Abraham was the promise made.