NOTES for Heb 1:3-4
The Letter to the Hebrews says much about the Messiah being higher than the angels. At first glance this is entirely obvious, and it looks strange that someone had to be convinced of what should already have been clear to them. But the matter, as can be seen, was not so simple.
The Letter to the Hebrews, according to the generally accepted opinion among biblical scholars, was written not by Paul himself but by one of his disciples, written after the apostle's martyrdom and after A.D. 70, and therefore after the catastrophe that completely changed the course of Jewish, and partly world, history. The revolt of A.D. 70 was not simply a war against Rome; it was a messianic war, conducted under religious slogans and perceived by its participants as sacred. It was one of the last surges of that militant messianism whose bearers in the Gospel era were the Zealots, the very ones who organized the revolt of A.D. 70.
The last messianic war of antiquity was the Bar Kokhba revolt, but when the letter was being written almost half a century still remained before it. In the 70s of the first century the militancy of the messianists had somewhat faded, which is no surprise: the defeat of the revolt and the complete destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple down to their foundations proved a terrible blow, from which it was by no means simple to recover. It is no surprise that in those times mystical messianism came to replace political messianism.
If to political messianists the Messiah appeared as a powerful earthly king whom God Himself supports, strengthening his kingdom and helping him win victory over all enemies, then to mystical messianists the Messiah really appeared as someone like an angel, a being not of this world in the full sense of the word. Many of them evidently considered the Messiah not a Man, but some kind of superhuman spirit who had never been human and was not supposed to be human.
Such an image was hardly any closer to the image of the real, Gospel Messiah than the image of a powerful earthly king that ruled in the minds of messianists of the Gospel era. Therefore the author of the letter insists that the Messiah is not some mysterious mighty angel, but a completely real Man, in His humanity not fundamentally different from any of us. But the fullness of God that this Man bears in Himself places Him above the angels: no angel was given such fullness.