 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 173, introducing the book of Hebrews. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey Mike, how are you? Good. Good. Finally got here. Finally did. Into the winter. I know something about winning, so it's nice to get into the book of that one or pole. We appreciate everybody that voted, and here we are, Hebrews. Yeah, here we are. You just had to throw that in again, didn't you? Of course. Every day until football kicks off, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, on to better things, which would be the book of Hebrews. Oh, okay. A winner. A winner. Yeah, right. You could stop. So from one winner to another winner, gotcha. Yeah, that's just what I was thinking. All right. Well, as we do, when we get into book studies, we always take the first episode to introduce the book, so we aren't going to be actually getting into chapter one today. This is going to be backgrounding, so introducing the book of Hebrews itself. We're going to talk about a few things about the book that down the road will matter as far as how we might be influenced to think about this or that word or this or that turn of a phrase or this or that context of something. So it's important, even though it is introductory, so we might as well just starting with the authorship, as most people are going to know, Hebrews doesn't ascribe itself to any author. It doesn't begin with a claim of authorship. So it's anonymous. And that isn't necessarily a big deal because sort of the flavoring of the content, the Jewishness, if you will, if I can use a broad term like that, it's still going to come through. So who exactly the author is? It doesn't really matter. I mean, some people might think it matters if it was Paul. We'll talk about that in a little bit. What I'm going to do is I'm going to read some excerpts from a couple of sources here that are really scholars that have spent most of their careers on the book of Hebrews. We've got Elaine and Guthrie are going to be the two that I draw on for the most part. But the specific authorship, again, the Pauline question is part of this bigger question. Granted, that might make a difference to some people because there will be a propensity or at least some sort of urge to compare what's said in Hebrews to something else that Paul might have said. But honestly, we're still going to do that because it's all the New Testament. We believe that the New Testament writers are going to present a consistent theology. So in my estimation, not having certainly on a specific author isn't that big of a deal. But we'll jump in here. It's still kind of interesting. So let me read a little bit from Elaine here and I'll try to remember what source it is. I'll try to look that up as I'm reading here and give people that just so that if they have the source, they can go look at more. But Lane writes, Hebrews is anonymous and the identity of the author has been veiled from the earliest period of the church, although it has been suggested the author was Priscilla or some other woman. We are well advised to refer to the author as he, as a male, in light of the masculine ending of the participle, VA Guminon in Hebrews 1132. I mean, Priscilla is one of the candidates, took a course, for instance, on the book of Hebrews and you go over authorship, Priscilla will come up, there's some discussion that she might have been the person who wrote this. And what Lane is saying, well, there's nothing, I'll just supplement here, there's nothing in the book that would claim a female authorship or exclude a female author explicitly. But Lane's argument is that there are a couple of places and he points out this participle in Hebrews 1132 that suggests a masculine hand. And here's what he means, if you go to Hebrews 1132, this is the verse that says, and what more shall I say for time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Sampson, Jephthah, and of David and Samuel and the prophets? You see, what's the big deal? Well, the little part of that verse that says to tell, that's a participle in Greek and it's a masculine participle. Greek participle forms have gender. And so this is one of the few indications in the book where you could actually, because of a particular form that the writer uses to refer to himself, time would fail me to tell you of this, the other thing, he uses this participle to refer to himself and he picks the masculine form instead of the feminine form. So that's Lane's argument. They're going to be things like this, not many of them, again, admittedly, but this is his example. And so, you know, he argues that we don't really know who it is, but we know it's not a woman because of this self-reference using a masculine form. That's a reasonable argument, but you'd wish there were more than that, but it's still reasonable. So back to Lane here. The writer was known to the community he addressed, according to Hebrews 1319. But the brief personal notes in Hebrews 13 are not specific enough to reveal his identity. Now, Lane adds, the author clearly was not Paul. There are a lot of people who would say Paul was the author. They're probably fair to say an equal number of people who say it wasn't and Lane is in this group. The author clearly was not Paul, though presumably he moved within the Paul line circle and expected to travel with Timothy. Now, if you go to Hebrews 1323, we read, you should know that our brother Timothy has been released and with whom I shall see you if he comes. With whom I shall see you if he comes. So people have latched onto this verse and say, well, this must be Paul. Timothy apparently gets out of jail and he's going to go join Timothy and, well, we don't really know that because Paul could have been in jail, too. He spent a lot of time in jail based upon the dating of this, you know, pistol is a good chance that Paul was in jail. So this couldn't really be talking, Paul talking about Timothy. It doesn't make much sense. And so the, you know, Lane is going to argue, well, it was somebody who, you know, knew Timothy and if he knew Timothy, chances are good he knew Paul. And so the verse doesn't really solve anything. Could be Paul, but it could also not be Paul and Lane lands on the side that it's not Paul. He continues here in the paragraph. The writer, you know, he classed himself as one who had not heard the Lord deliver the message of salvation and he wasn't one of the 12. It's Hebrews two, three and four. He was capable of writing some of the finest Greek in the New Testament, far superior in vocabulary and sentence construction to that of Paul. And let me just stop there again. I think this is probably the best argument against Paul. Paul has patterns. It's like any writer. There are certain predictable things in Paulian epistles that are going to mark the idea of the reality that these multiple texts that we're looking at, they show the same features. Therefore, ergo, they were written by the same person. And this person is identified in epistles as Paul. Okay. And so we, we look for these patterns. Anything else that we've written with the same patterns, we're going to assign to Paul because how would you fake that? Okay. And what he's saying here, what Lane is saying here is that when you read Hebrews, it's a lot different than what Paul writes in terms of his vocabulary and sentence structure. And that's true. So I think personally, this is the best argument against the author being Paul. Lane continues, he, the author also employs a distinctive range of images that are not found in Paul. And he gives a few verses, you know, different, you know, in the Hebrews two, one, four, 12, let's look at four, 12, for instance. Hebrews four, 12 says, for the word of God is living an active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing the division of soul and spirit of joints and marrow, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Well, you know, in Paul's epistles, the ones that we know, he wrote, he never really talks about the word this way. So this is a different image, different, you know, different way of talking about something that Paul does talk about, but he doesn't use the same image. So the argument becomes, again, that the writer here of Hebrews, and this isn't just one, he has a string of verse references here. Two, one, four, 12, four, 13, chapter six, verses seven and eight, verse 19. This is an argument, again, that Lane would use and others, of course, to say that, you know, probably not looking at Pauline authorship here. He also adds, the author moves easily within the conceptual world of priesthood and sacrifice, emphases that are not or that are foreign to Paul's letters. And the point there, again, I'll break in here. The point there is not to say Paul never talks about sacrifices or a priesthood. You know, he does, but there's such a heavy emphasis in this book that Lane thinks this is an argument, again, against Pauline authorship. You know, you could argue on the other side, well, Paul is a Pharisee, good grief, they would know what's going on with the Levitical system, wouldn't they? Yeah, they would. So I think that part of the argument is in great, again, going back to what I said a few moments ago. I think the best argument against Pauline authorship is the vocabulary and the sentence structure of the Greek. Hebrews is notorious. I mean, if you went to seminary, you got a degree, either a THM focused on Greek or doctoral program, where you basically have to translate the whole New Testament, you're going to be, you're not going to be looking forward to working in Luke or in Hebrews, because the Greek is quite different than anything else. It's very elevated. It's literary, has a higher literary quality. It's kind of the difference between reading Shakespeare and left behind. OK, it's that kind of thing. So that those sorts of differences show up in when you're looking at Greek, too. And so it's very evident that it's different than any of the Pauline letters. And so again, I think that's the best argument. And some people, for that reason, have actually proposed Luke, because Luke is kind of the same way they propose Luke as an author. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense because Luke, you know, he's writing to a Gentile friend, you know, his name is Gentile. He's not one of the 12, you know, how would he know about Leviticus and all the priests and all that kind of stuff? So it doesn't really make any sense that Luke would write it. But he gets talked about as an author for that reason. Lane jumps in here and says, again, the writer's educational level may be compared with that of Philo of Alexandria. And Philo was a very well known writer in the first century. Again, an academic, well trained. You know, there's going to be there's going to be content items in the book of Hebrews that are going to harken back to certain things that Philo wrote and thought about. And so, you know, some people would say, well, whoever wrote this had to be sort of schooled in the way Philo was. Probably, as Lane says, reflects, you know, training, you know, in a private rhetorical school, fancy school. You say, well, Paul was taught, you know, by Paul was taught by Gamaliel, a Pharisee. That's a little bit different than Philo. Philo was not a Pharisee. So it's another argument against, you know, Pauline authorship here. Lane, back to him, he says, Luke's description of Apollos in Acts 1824 as a, quote, eloquent man matters for the discussion to at least a number of people. So Luke's description of Apollos, a designation associated with formal rhetorical training, was actually used by Philo. Philo refers to people who, you know, who were, you know, trained the way he was as eloquent men. So the fact that Apollos is described this way and the fact that the Greek itself and some of the content harken back to somebody trained in this manner is used as father for many people or many scholars to say, well, we think Apollos wrote the book of Hebrews, he may well have. Lane continues. The writer was an intensely devout man whose subconscious mind was steeped in the cultic categories and ritual stuff and Leviticus and the language of the Septuagint. He was a pastoral theologian who shaped early Christian tradition into an urgent appeal to a community in crisis. He was a gifted preacher and interpreter of salvation, a covenant theologian whose spiritual insight, scriptural exegesis and situational discernment provided encouragement, admonition and pastoral direction. So, you know, you can say all those things about Paul, but you could probably say them about Apollos, too. Again, the way Apollos is represented in Acts 18, again, especially the eloquence, the way that ties into Philo. So I think if for those who are not, you know, Pauline on the Pauline side of this, there are a number who would think Apollos is a reasonable candidate. But the reality is we don't really know. OK, nobody really knows for sure. Lane's material came from the dictionary of the later New Testament developments. It's one of the IVP series that I recommend a lot. I want to quote something from Guthrie, his introduction to Hebrews about the same thing, the same topic, the authorship. He says, the anonymity of the text is an immediate difficulty for Pauline authorship. In other words, the fact that the letter begins with no personal greeting, no personal claim to, you know, I, Paul, writing to this and that shirt, you Paul does that all the time. And the fact that Hebrews doesn't do that, Guthrie suggests, is really an argument against Pauline authorship. Why wouldn't he do it here when he does it everywhere else? So the anonymity of the text is a difficulty. Since nowhere is there any suggestion that Paul would have written anonymously and all the other stuff he gives his name. An apostle who meticulously claims authority in the introduction to the existing epistles attributed to his name is not likely to have sent a letter without reference to that special authority vested in him. And let me just break in here. The whole point is that if Paul wrote Hebrews, he breaks. He doesn't do what he does everywhere else. So it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense back to Guthrie. Moreover, there's no suggestion in the way that the author of Hebrews writes that he has known the same dramatic experience as Paul underwent at his conversion, which is never far from the surface in Paul's other letters. Of more modern guesses, Apollos has had the most supporters, mainly on the supposition that as an Alexandrian, he would have been familiar with the ways of thought of his fellow Alexandrian Philo, which are supposed to be reflected in this epistle. So there you have it, end of Guthrie quote. So we don't really know who wrote it. There's no reason just reflexively to think Paul wrote it because it uses the Old Testament a lot. There are some significant disconnects with Paul. So I think that's all we really need to say. Whoever wrote it knew his Old Testament well, knew Greek very well and used the Septuagint a lot. And that's going to be an issue of importance as we proceed through the book, what using the Septuagint intentionally in certain ways to make certain points. As far as the audience, who's it written to? Let me just read a little bit more from Guthrie here. He says the first point to note is the definition of the word Hebrews, because the book opens. Let's just read the introduction of the book here. You know, the superscription is Hebrews, but then we've got long ago at many times in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. So again, you've got a very Jewish context again. So this is why the book is going to get the superscription. It does the letter to the Hebrews and all that stuff. And that's really from the get-go. It's oriented to our fathers by the prophets. And it's oriented to a Jewish context. Now, back to Guthrie, it could be used specifically of Jews who spoke Hebrew. Maybe again, the superscription of the book. And then there's a Jewish context, but are they Jews who spoke Hebrew? Do they speak Aramaic? Are they Hellenistic Jews? There's still a question there, because they didn't all think the same. So Guthrie says it could be that he's addressing Jews who spoke Hebrew or Aramaic, in which case it would distinguish them from the Greek speaking Jews, again, the Hellenistic Jews. This suggestion has some other New Testament support, again, these different groups. But there is no means of knowing whether the traditional title to the epistle was intended in this sense. It may have meant no more than Jews. Hey, it's written to Jews out there who have become Christians, regardless of whether you speak Aramaic, regardless of whether you speak Hebrew, regardless of whether you speak Greek. You're all Jews. You become Christians now. The assumption is that Jews speaking any of these languages would have known the Old Testament well and they could have because they have the Hebrew Bible. They've got Aramaic Targams and they've got the Septuagint. OK, so the fact that we're addressing Jews is really sort of more broadly important than which group of Jews is being addressed. We just you can't really know. So there's just ambiguity there. Guthrie continues, in view of the very general nature of the traditional title, it is significant that certain indications are given that a particular community was still in mind. Certainly, the author knows something of their history in the background. He knows they've been abused for their faith and that they have they have reacted well to the plundering of their property. It's mentioned in Hebrews 10, verses 33 and 34. So whoever the author is, he's aware of some of the things that are going on with this group, whoever the group is, back to Guthrie. He's aware of his readers generosity, Hebrews 610, and he knows about their present state of mind. Hebrews 5, Hebrews 6. Certain practical problems such as their attitude to their leaders, Hebrews 13, 17 and matters of money and marriage. Again, Hebrews 13, 4 and 5 are mentioned. It seems most reasonable to suppose that the writer has personal knowledge of the specific people he has in mind throughout the epistle. If this is true, the vague character of the title is clearly misleading, just a bunch of Hebrews. One further feature which confirms this is the specific mention of Timothy in Hebrews 13, 23. For Timothy also must have been known to the readers. So whoever the audience is, again, they would have known Timothy because the author mentions Timothy and chances are very good that the author knew this particular group. So it's not random. It's not just Jews anywhere. Hey, if you're a Jew, you'd better read this. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of Old Testament in it. Doesn't really matter what language they speak because they're going to have a knowledge of the Old Testament by either primary text or translation like the Septuagint. But it's not random. You know, it's just not thrown out there. Still, if you're a Jew, you could get a lot out of the book. But the author still has a particular group in mind. That's all Guthrie's saying. So again, we don't specifically know who that group was. Obviously, they're under persecution. This becomes a sort of an issue and it will become sort of an issue when we get to certain passages about, you know, what's going on with this particular group. Again, to go back to Guthrie, he says, still further indication of the nature of the group may be deduced from such references as 512, which says, for though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food. And references like Hebrews 10, 25, not neglecting to meet together as the habit of some but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day approaching. And the former Hebrews 512 is addressed to those who ought by now to be teachers. And this has given rise to the suggestion that the readers and the intended audience were a small part of a larger group of Christians. The most favorite suggestion is that they formed a house group which had broken away from the main church. The exhortation in 1025 would support this view. There, the writer urges the readers not to forsake the assembling of themselves together. It seems reasonably conclusive that the whole of a church would not have been thought of as potential teachers. And it's highly probable that a separatist group might have considered themselves superior to the rest, especially if they were endowed with greater gifts. The closely argued theme in this epistle is in line with the suggestion that a group of people of a more intellectual caliber is in mind. So, again, he's trying, what Guthrie's trying to do there is he's taken these two passages and saying, look, it's kind of unlikely that a whole church, you know, Paul would say to a whole entire church, even though this is the way it gets preached. It's unlikely that Paul would look out over an entire congregation and say, hey, y'all ought to be teachers by now. Well, is that really true anywhere? I mean, some people in the congregation should be teaching. You know, they ought to know more content and so on and so forth, be more mature. Would Paul really say that to every last believer? Well, probably not. And if that's the case, then who's he addressing? Well, he's probably addressing a subset, either a group within this church or because he references the assembling together in chapter 10. Maybe there's a group who, you know, a smaller group who left the bigger group and Paul's talking specifically to that smaller group. You know, and what he says is, well, you're really not teachers. You know, you really need, you know, to be taught the basics of the faith. You know, you're not, basically you're not as versed as you think you are. And then there's some potential here for some problems. And then, you know, the comment in verse 10 about being still part of a member of the larger group, you know, might be an issue. All of that can make sense. All that can be coherent. But ultimately, again, we aren't really told those specifics. But I will say, I think it's reasonable, again, to think that Paul is addressing a subset of, quote, Jews, quote, Hebrews, OK, that he does have a particular audience in mind. I don't know that it's a separatist group or a breakaway group. Maybe it's just a group who believes a certain thing or is struggling with a certain thing or who knows. But it does make sense that it's not random. It's not, you know, just sort of thrown out there to every blasted Jew, OK, that's become a Christian. You should all be teachers. You know, you should all this book's addressed to all of you. It makes more sense, again, that the writer, again, has a specific group, specific subset in mind, you know, whoever the writer was. So, you know, be that as it may. And we just can't have complete clarity on that. And that becomes an issue when we get to passages in the book that talk about apostasy, OK, forsaking the faith and that sort of thing. So Guthrie, again, says it must be admitted that the warning passages say nothing about apostasy to Judaism, but only apostasy away from Christianity. On the whole, the view that posits the threat of an apostasy to Judaism among certain Jewish Christians, whether former priests or not, has generally more to commend it than alternative views. So, you know, what he's angling for there in that quote is that if Paul is writing to Hebrews, to Jews and a subset, again, within that larger group, when he talks about apostasy, again, they're already Jews. So they've made a decision to follow Christ. So the warning passages very logically, then, are reflecting a concern that they give up their Christian faith. And if he's speaking to Jews, then, even though there's nothing explicit about it, the sort of the feeling you get is that there there could be a problem, again, with certain Jewish people who have accepted Jesus as Messiah for whatever reason, discouraged, you know, they're under persecution, you know, their passages that mention again, losing property and stuff like that, that those Jewish converts to Christianity might be reconsidering it and might be wanting to go back and join, you know, become Jews again, forsake the faith and become Jews again. That problem, you know, Guthrie says that's a realistic way to look at this as opposed to Christians who didn't come out of Judaism, but now Christians deciding what we want to give up our faith and become Jews. That's a different issue. And what Guthrie is saying, and I agree with him, that makes less sense to have, let's say, Gentiles. Well, I did this Christian thing a lot, and I want to become a Jew, OK? Because the Christians are persecuted. If I just became a Jew, I'd get rid of the persecution problem, you know, that's that's one thing where you have a Gentile, you know, who now wants to convert to Judaism. That's less coherent than saying, OK, you've got people who came from the Jewish community, they became Christians and the Christians are now under persecution and now they're thinking about going back. That that that makes a little more sense. Now, I think we're going to we're going to have to think about that as we go through the book, because some of you are probably wondering or probably thinking even now that, well, does that have certain points of analogy to maybe the Judaizing problem in the New Testament, like in what Paul writes about, OK, where you had certain Jews who, yes, they came to the faith, but now they're insisting upon certain Jewish practices of converts, Gentile converts. And I would say, yeah, that there probably is some relationship to that. You know, as opposed to just Jews being cranky, you know, we're OK that you became a Christian, but you got to do this, that of the other thing, or you should just forsake the gospel and you come back and you become a convert to Judaism. Those are those are two related, but different things. So which which one kind of makes more sense? And, you know, Paul has this problem, the so-called Judaizing problem in his letters. It's going to surface here that in other words, if you're the writer of the book of Hebrews and you're you're dividing a lot of space to demonstrate that Christ is superior to the law, that the priesthood of Melchizedek is superior to the priesthood of the Levi, you know, of Levi and Aaron. If Christ is superior to this, that and the other thing, if you're making these arguments again, you're you're arguing against forsaking, you know, you're embracing of Jesus Messiah and just going back to Judaism and Guthrie and again, and I'm agreeing with him here, that makes more sense. That scenario makes more sense than just Gentiles being seduced to become Jews now. It just makes more sense that if you've already been part of this community, you've left it to embrace Jesus. And now you're thinking, did I do the right thing? Or, you know, did I make a mistake here? Or whatever, whatever's going through your mind that that is probably more of the issue than the alternative than the other option. I think we also have, you know, we're going to touch on some things that probably for a lot of listeners are going to take them into, well, what about Hebrew, the Hebrew roots movement now? Yeah, I think there's there are issues there because frankly, the some of the more extreme, you know, things going on in the Hebrew roots movement, that really looks a lot like a Judaizing problem to me. More, again, is it more than just, you know, sort of pretending to be experts, you know, at the Old Testament or something like that, just to draw an audience or whatever, or I want to feel Jewish, I like dancing, so let's do this or that. Again, there's all sorts of great Asians. I have really good friends who are pastors in messianic congregations. They're not Hebrew roots people. In fact, they're opposed to it. So I'm not going to caricature. I'm not going to conflate as a better way to say it. Messianic congregations with Hebrew roots. I think a lot of listeners are going to know the difference there. They're two related things, but yet they're still different. But I think the more extreme manifestations of this, the Hebrew roots thinking, yeah, I think some of what we're going to run into in the book of Hebrews is going to tread on that. It's going to drift over into that territory and really, again, that kind of stuff needs to be addressed. So, you know, who's the audience? Again, it's probably fair to say obviously Jews, but there are still some subset group here that has some specific problems or concerns. There are others who say, well, you know, does that exclude Gentiles? You know, can't we have Gentile readers in here that are also in view? And the answer is, well, sure. I mean, it's the body of Christ. Okay, it's the first century. They've been taught that we're all part of the family of God now. We don't exclude Gentiles. You're certainly going to have Gentiles that are part of this mix. And that shouldn't stop though seeing a Jewish orientation to the audience because Gentiles, if they're in the church and the word of God is being taught, they're going to be taught from the Septuagint. They can read it. There's no language barrier there. Everybody reads Greek. This is the post Alexander. This is the Hellenistic world. Everybody's going to be able to read Greek who could read it all. And so this isn't an obstacle. Again, the fact that it's heavily Old Testament context. You know, therefore it's heavily Jewish. That's not an obstacle to a Gentile folks. There was no New Testament at this time. Their Bible is the Old Testament. Whether you're a Gentile or not, if you are a member of a believing community, when you meet to study the word of God, you are studying the Old Testament. That is just the way it is. Now you know, hey, you might get lucky to, hey, a letter of Paul showed up last week. Let's read that thing and pass it on. Copy it and pass it on. Okay, you know, you're going to have chances or have some of those episodes, but there's no full blown New Testament. The word of God for this, the church in the first century is the Old Testament. So Gentiles are going to learn that. So there's no obstacle to, again, churches being typically mixed to what we're thinking about in terms of audience. The audience is going to be, again, our fathers, verse one, again, it's going to be oriented to Jews who have become Christians, but that is not to exclude Gentiles who are going to be familiar with the Old Testament because there are a lot of those people out there. So we have to remember that as well. Let's cover occasion and date. We'll say a little bit about this. We're going to go back to Lane here. Lane has, again, I think some worthwhile things to say about this. He writes, the writer, again, whoever he is, is alarmed at the group's attraction to traditions that he regarded as inconsistent with the word of God proclaimed by their former leaders. He references here, Hebrews 13, seven, through nine, which I'll read. Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, which have not benefited those devoted to them. Again, the reference to food there is interesting. Is that meat sacrifice to idols or is that Jewish dietary laws people have argued both sides that, but again, back to Lane, he says, the writer is really concerned, again, at this group that he's addressing. They're being attracted. They're being drawn away by traditions that he regarded as inconsistent with what they had formerly been taught. And Lane says, this may account for the tension between the community and their current leaders. In Hebrews 13, one, 13, 17 and 18, Paul has to tell them to respect their elders. I mean, not Paul, but the writer of Hebrews has to tell them to respect their leadership. So there's something going on there. There's just something going on there. Lane writes, it may also explain their apparent isolation and lack of accountability to the larger network of house churches in Hebrews 13, 24. So the supposition again is you have a network of these house churches. Hebrews 13, 24 says, greet all your leaders and all saints, those who come from Italy, send you greetings. So the fact that it's plural, leaders and holy ones, your other believers, leads some scholars, Lane is one of them, to think that we have a network of house churches here. And so maybe there's something going on there too. These factors, Lane continues, would have exposed them to the corrosive impact of their sociopolitical and religious environment. In other words, if you get something going on in one of these groups, everybody's gonna get exposed if you have this network. So the writer is concerned that there's something going on there that is inconsistent with what they had been taught before and it's causing some problems here. He continues, we should probably understand Hebrews to be addressing the concerns of second generation Christians. The root of the problem may have been the delay of the Parusia, that's the second coming. You know, why hasn't Jesus come back? So he's saying the root of the problem may have been that. And he references Hebrews 10, 25 here, where it talks about, hey, keep meeting together and so much more as you see the day drawing near. So it shouldn't be news to anybody listening to this podcast, but the early church, the church described in the New Testament believers thought the Lord was gonna return really, really soon. And so the longer that takes, again, you can have people, again, be discouraged by that or think, well, what's going on? You know, what's the problem? Are we suffering? Why is the Lord coming back and all this kind of thing? So Lane suggests the root of the problem, again, whatever it was that they're being drawn away by other teaching or they're being discouraged or there's a lot that they could talk about in the book of Hebrews about being discouraged and falling into unbelief, that that might have something to do with the circumstances of their persecution, the fact that the Lord hasn't come back yet. Again, it very well could be back to Lane again. He says, a significant symptom was the faltering of hope. Hebrews 3.6, Hebrews 6.11, Hebrews 6.18 through 20, so on. The faltering of hope and the writer sensed that he sensed the grave danger of apostasy among some members, they would just give up their faith. Which he defined apostasy as turning away from the living God, Hebrews 3.12, and subjecting Jesus Christ to public contempt, Hebrews 6.4 through 6, Hebrews 10, 26 through 31. Once the sacred covenant bond between God and His people was violated, they would be excluded from covenant fellowship. Weaker members might reject the grace of God and forfeit participation in the new covenant through personal carelessness. And he's listing out again, he's kind of, he's trying to put in modern words what goes on in some of the passages. I mean, we're gonna be talking about all these passages, these apostasy passages, these, you know, the concern, the warnings about falling into unbelief and all that sort of stuff. We don't know specifically what's going on here, but Lane is trying to build the case for. It has something to do with turning away from Christ, maybe even turning away from God altogether. And there had to be some reason for that. And again, he's thinking it's persecution, it's the delay of the second coming and all that. So he says, these factors might well account for the urgent tone and pastoral strategies adopted by the writer. Again, we don't know for sure, but again, all that's reasonable, and all that's reasonable to think. Now he also adds in assigning a date for the composition of Hebrews, we must first allow for the fact that both the writer and his audience had come to faith through the preaching of those who had heard Jesus. That's Hebrews two, three, and four. So again, it's the second generation. So this is, we're in the first century and probably again, it takes a little time for you have the original 12, the early church, you know, then that church gets dispersed because Hebrews is gonna touch on that circumstance a little bit. It's probably gonna take 10, 20 years or so, you know, after the crucifixion for this set of circumstances to sort of manifest itself. But you have second generation converts here who are, again, Jews coming to the Christian faith accepting that Jesus is the Messiah. That takes a little bit of time. And so to date the book, you gotta think on those terms. He says, we learned that the present members had been believers for an extended time. So Hebrews five, 12, if we allow at least three or four decades to elapse since the beginning of the Christian movement, again, the resurrection, the early estate we can assign for the composition of Hebrews would be around 60. Now, a lot of scholars, this is, I'm just gonna break in here. A lot of scholars, you know, are sort of oriented by this thought. 60 seems to be a preferable number for a lot of them. Why? Well, to summarize a lot of material, it's before 70. Okay, it's before the destruction of the temple. Again, there's, so we have this old problem. There's nothing specific about the destruction of the temple in the book. And it's also, you know, again, considerably after the resurrection. Now, 60 is gonna become a number that's also preferred because of some other things. You know, they have, you know, Timothy's imprisonment and so on. And he was connected with Paul and the chronology of Paul's life. Again, Paul, his death is usually sort of fixed around the mid-60s, we'll say, just to use round numbers here. So there's this, again, sort of assumption that we're probably around 60. In regard to the 70, let me just throw this out. And again, this is from Lane again. He says, some scholars have set an upper limit at 70, the year in which the Jerusalem temple was destroyed by Titus. This conclusion is based on the writers referring to cultic activity in the present tense, in other words, stuff that goes on in the temple. The writer refers to that when he used the present tense. And he gives a few verse references there. So it's based on the writer's reference to cultic activity in the present tense and the presumption that cultic activity was being carried out in Jerusalem. But the writer shows no interest in the Jerusalem temple or in contemporary sacrificial practices. In Hebrews nine, one through 10, for example, the focus is actually on the tabernacle. In the wilderness, of course, that was long gone. Rather than the temple, since the sanctuary is considered in relation to the old new covenants, the contrast between the two, the writer refers to the tabernacle and the old Sinai covenant, rather than to the temple of his own day. So what Lane is saying there is that we can't really take the language about temple practices as indicating for sure that the book was written before the destruction of Jerusalem. But you would think if it was written after the destruction of the temple that something would have been said. This kind of talk goes on for a lot of updating of New Testament books because it's hard for us to imagine the impact of the destruction of the temple on this community at this time. It would be like, I mean, what could we compare it to? I guess for Catholics, it would be like seeing the Vatican destroyed. You would think everything that you wrote about your faith after that point would somehow reference that because it would just be so dramatic. But like the end of the papacy or something like that. It's from modern political times. Like the White House gets burned down or something like that. It's an event of such magnitude that if you're discussing anything related to, again, then the one case relates to the other case, you know, your political system, that you would reference this event in some way. You wouldn't just say nothing. And again, it's an argument from silence, but part of me thinks that that's kind of reasonable too because it is so dramatic you think you would have said something. So I'm comfortable with a date for the book prior to 70. Okay, I'm comfortable with that. I don't think we need to really look for anything beyond 70. If you get into the authorship, something called the Edict of Claudius is gonna come up. This was the decree where we have, we have a lot of Jewish Christians getting expelled from Rome by the Emperor Claudius in AD 49. And so some Hebrew scholars think that Hebrews 10, 32 through 34 refers to this event. Let me just read you the verses. Recall the former days when after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession in an abiding one. That's Hebrews 10, verses 32 through 34. So some think that this is a reference to the Edict of Claudius where Jewish Christians are just being driven out of Rome. And now among them we know from the book of Acts, Acts 18, which specifically mentions this, Acts 18 too, I'll just read it. This is the account of Aquila and Priscilla. He, Paul, found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife, Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. Okay, there's a direct reference to it in the life of Paul and it links to Aquila and Priscilla. So some people think, well, Hebrews 10 might be referring to the same thing and that means the book had to be written after AD 49. So you give it a while, you're pushing 60 again and 60 becomes the sort of orienting point. Now there are others, and Lane is actually included in this, who think that Hebrews 10, 32 through 34 does not or do not collectively refer to the Edict of Claudius. He thinks it refers to something more severe like the persecutions of Nero, which are gonna be in the early 60s. So he dates the book of Hebrews before 70, but still a little bit after what Nero is doing. Again, we don't know. So I think just for round numbers, 60 is not bad, early 60s, again, it's an imprecise thing. It's far from a perfect science, but that's what you're dealing with at the end. Ultimately, again, if you're a Jew, you're gonna be familiar with how your people have been persecuted and specifically how Jewish Christians have been persecuted, they are the targets, whether it's Claudius or Nero. And so when the book does talk about persecution, again, that helps you orient the audience to a Jewish context, and again, maybe still a subset here, depending on whatever circumstance the writer happens to be talking about, whether it's struggling with giving up the faith or persecution or whatnot. There's still something to be said, again, for the Jews as a whole, and then sort of drilling down into that Jewish Christians that are under specific set of circumstances, they find themselves either under persecution or having other specific problems that a date around 60 makes sense, makes sense. So there's nothing that would be really getting in its way, but we just don't know for sure. The other thing we should comment about really gets into interpretation. So that was all backgrounding for the book. One of the big deals that we're gonna run into in the book of Hebrews is, and I mentioned it before, the Septuagint. So the book heavily makes heavy use of the Old Testament. All right? No question the writer knows his Old Testament. Well, quotes the Old Testament all the time. He's comparing Christ, the superiority of Christ to lots of things in the Old Testament. So you're gonna have to quote the Old Testament for that. You're gonna have to have a deep knowledge of the Old Testament to make those points very obvious. Generally when the writer, most of the time when the writer quotes the Old Testament, he quotes the Septuagint, again, which is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. In other words, he does not quote the traditional Hebrew text. So there're gonna be places in the book where a theological point is going to extend from or be based upon or at least oriented around something the Septuagint says, the way the Septuagint renders whatever text its own creators had in front of them. And that text may be different than the traditional Maseridic texts. They're gonna run into cases where it is. We're also gonna run into cases where it's not clear if the writer had a different text or if he's just being really kind of elastic in his translation, whoever the Septuagint translator was and then the New Testament author of Hebrews picks that up. We're gonna run into situations like that. So again, that's a heads up on that. The other thing that's related to this is just general interpretation because when you start quoting the Old Testament and you say, well, this passage meant this and you're making arguments out of it, there're gonna be places where we wind up in the Old Testament, let's just say something in the Psalms for sake of illustration about the Messiah, okay? There's gonna be something going on where the writer will say something, he'll quote something from the Old Testament, again, chances are out of the Septuagint and you're gonna look at the passage. And even if we can be sure that that's pretty literal rendering, you know, you probably had the same text as the traditional Hebrew text and put it into Greek, you're gonna be looking at that and what the Old Testament says and then you're gonna be looking at what the book of Hebrews says and you're gonna think, what is that guy thinking? How in the world does he extract that theological point out of that verse? It just doesn't look like the Old Testament is saying what this guy is saying it says. We're gonna run into those situations and that's gonna take us into something called the census planar, okay? The fuller sense, problem, controversy, issue in interpretation. Now I'm gonna read, again, a little section, this is from Hagner, Donald Hagner, who was a professor at Fuller for a number of years. He has a book called Encountering the Book of Hebrews and this is sort of an undergraduate textbook but I like his little discussion of census planar here. He says here, given the fulfillment that has come to God's people in Jesus Christ, the Old Testament is seen to possess a fuller or deeper sense, a census planar. The recognition of this fuller meaning, that's essentially what the Latin phrase means, a fuller sense. The recognition of this fuller meaning of the Old Testament that goes beyond the intention of the original authors does not open the door to arbitrary and frivolous exegesis as is sometimes alleged. One is able to compare the old and new testaments and repeatedly say this is that. This type of interpretation is called Pecher and it is found in the Qumran community. Again, we've talked, this is me breaking it down, we've talked about that in relation to Melchizedek with the 11 Q. Melchizedek text. So there are some places where you can say, okay, you look at the Old Testament and a writer says, well, this is what it means. Sometimes it's gonna be clear, other times you're gonna be thinking, what in the world's going on? If you remember the 11 Q. Melchizedek and the Melchizedek episode, that guy who ever wrote 11 Q. Melchizedek had, for some reason, he linked Melchizedek to the Elohim of Psalm 82, the one presiding over the group of Elohim. He sort of deifies the figure, like what in the world is he talking about? How is he getting that out of Psalm 82? And we talked in that episode about, well, there are different threads that sort of extend from Melchizedek, this whole idea of kingship and that gets tied to messiahship and messiahship in turn, yes, the messiah is cast as more than a man. And I mean, you have all these sort of layers, a little, again, little sort of small thoughts that bleed into one big thought and then that big thought becomes the basis for another thought. This is what you see going on in the Second Temple period in how certain people interpret the Old Testament. What Hagner's saying here is, you know, there's some relationship between Qumran scribes or other scribes in the Second Temple period who look at the Old Testament and they don't just see the words in front of them, they see all the ideas that have sort of preceded. And they just sort of glom all that together and then they come up with an interpretation out of that single passage that leaves the reader thinking, man, where do you get that? Well, they actually get it from lots of places but they're packing it into this one verse. So it's still biblical but you couldn't get all that just from the words of this one verse. The words of this one verse sort of build upon lots of other verses from other places and ideas that have preceded it. And that all gets sort of packed into that one verse and then the writer just, you know, says what he says based upon looking at that one passage. Well, what Hagner's saying is, you know, the census, Qunor idea that, you know, we're living on the other side of the cross and we can see that some of what the Old Testament says, really the full impact of it can only really be discerned after the cross, you know, with the story of Christ and all that. And so these Old Testament passages, they say what they say but they had this fuller sense. And we're going to run into a lot of those kinds of situations in the book of Hebrews. And he has actually an extended sort of discussion on a census planor that I think, you know, even though we've do it at a few minutes to it, I think it's really worth reading the whole thing. So I'm just going to read the whole thing. It's three paragraphs and it'll give me, I think, maybe a little bit better idea of what we're dealing with here. And then I'm going to throw in a couple of thoughts of my own at the end because this is good. But I think that there's just some, something that needs to be added to it. Actually, two things that need to be added to it. But here we go. So Hagner writes in his little sidebar in the book called Census Planor and the Interpretation of Old Testament he writes, in the vast majority of Old Testament quotations in Hebrews as throughout the New Testament, we encounter an understanding of texts that does not grow out of grammatical historical exegesis. That is out of the actual meaning intended by the original authors for the original readers. Because of this, the use of these quotations in Hebrews often has been questioned or even rejected by scholars as arbitrary and frivolous. In other words, this is me now. In other words, the New Testament guys are just making stuff up. Not some scholars say that. Back to Hagner. These texts, it is alleged, simply do not mean what the New Testament authors take them to mean. It is a fact that the New Testament writers find more meaning in texts than the original authors intended or even could have known. In this, they follow an already established Jewish practice wherein certain texts were regarded as having more meaning than was realized in their particular historical contexts. As for example, in the so-called Messianic Psalms. These texts pointed beyond themselves to the future. The first Christians, all of them Jews, read their Old Testament scriptures differently after they had encountered the risen Christ and the fulfillment he brought. From that time on, Christ was the hermeneutical key that unlocked the meaning of the Old Testament. Their interpretation became Christocentric. Many texts, not all, were now seen to point to Christ and what had happened was happening and what would happen through him in the future. The meaning of texts now seen retrospectively through the New Prism of Christ often is called census planar, a fuller or deeper sense. Here, the original author alluded unconsciously to things beyond his purview, the ultimate meaning of which could be known only at a later time by those who experienced the fulfillment brought by Christ. And that's from Hagner. Now, two thoughts on my own on this. You know, on the one hand, there's obviously something to this because of Christ, okay? You know, if you read both testaments, what you read in the New Testament is ultimately, I shouldn't say ultimately, it is invariably going to influence your thinking in some way at some point of the Old Testament. Yeah, you just can't help for that to be the case. So that's on the table, I get it. I think again, that's gonna be just something that that's easy to see. Now, as far as what Hagner has to say about that, I have a couple of thoughts. I would say the Old Testament statement may have meant more than the Old Testament authors understood. Okay, we get that. But it can't mean less. And it can't mean something contrary. Yeah, I think a line does need to be drawn there. It can mean more. The Old Testament writer could, what he's writing, again, he didn't realize it. Ultimately, what he's writing down is gonna mean more than he thinks it means. That's true, but it's not gonna mean less. In other words, the original intent is not gonna be violated. It's not gonna mean less. It's not gonna be contradictory. I personally think, and this is my second thought, the issue of how the fuller sense operates, its connection to Christ, would actually be better understood when we interpret the Old Testament in its ancient Near Eastern context. If we do this first, then we don't impose Christ on the Old Testament. I would argue we don't need to do any kind of imposition like that. My view is that the fuller sense of what the New Testament is saying actually becomes more comprehensible if we take the Old Testament in its own original context in the first place. That is, we can see how the thought process proceeded more clearly if we really understand what's going on in the Old Testament. Now, again, to try to put it yet another way. I think the census planore, again, it's the idea of we're reading, okay, here's something New Testament writers saying, he quotes the Old Testament and you look back at the Old Testament and think, how could he get that? Okay. I think that's a problem for us because we can't think as abstractly about the Old Testament as they could. And the reason they could is because a lot of what the Old Testament text says inherently is hooked into a wider worldview. Okay, just a wider way of thinking, a supernaturalist worldview, a certain cosmology. Again, people in the ancient Near East are not used to thinking the way modern Bible students and pastors and scholars are taught to think. Where you take the text apart syllable by syllable, you know, the grammatical, historical, exegetical method or you concord results and you compare, oh, well, he uses this word 17 times and this one only through, nobody's doing that in the ancient world. That's just the way it is. And modern scholars don't like to hear that, but that's the truth. Nobody is reading texts that way in the ancient world. When they read texts, they know that, okay, there's sort of a, you know, initial way to understand the words, you know, there's a first thing that pops into your head. I don't want to use the word literal because it's so misunderstood, but sort of this first reflex way of reading it, you know, in your sort of immediate setting and your circumstances. But they know that to really understand this text, a lot of the language here is going to be, that the meaning of it is going to be apparent only if you're aware of the wider frame of reference of the writer and the people he's writing to. Because they're going to use words that are just packed with theology that are just packed, you know, with layers and layers of meaning. That a metaphorical reading, a symbolic reading of the Old Testament is going to be more reflexive. It's going to be more, people are going to Old Testament people would go there earlier than we would. They're just going to gravitate to that because they can look at the words on this, you know, on this piece of paper, on this parchment, on this animal skin, whatever it is, they're going to look at the words there. And because of their worldview, they can grasp the full range of possible meanings more easily than we can. And a lot of what falls in the full range of meanings is going to be abstract. It's going to be metaphor. It's going to be symbolic. They're just going to have that sort of loaded into their heads at the outset. And we don't. So when we look at the way a first century person quotes a text that was written a millennium earlier, okay, when we look at that process, we look at a first century writer quoting something that was read a millennium earlier. And the person who wrote it a millennium earlier is culturally and religiously, okay, ethnically even, part of the same group, okay? They are able to understand how this text that they are quoting could have been understood, could have been read. They're able to sort of discern terminology and pick up on the semantic baggage, again, the metaphorical baggage, all of the meanings that could be loaded into a term much more easily, much more reflexively than we can. They're just going to see things that we don't. They're going to see connections. They're going to, you know, we look at a term and we're going to think two or three possibilities. They're going to think five or six. And some of those five or six are going to be built on metaphor, intellectual framework, cognitive frame of reference, worldview, cosmology and all this stuff. So I actually think that this problem of census planore is in some ways, I mean, not in every case, okay? But in many ways is an outgrowth of our inability to read the Old Testament the way an Israelite would have read it and also is an outgrowth of generations of people who have gone before us being taught not to read it that way. You know, I'm a scholar. I'm not an enemy of doing what we call the grammatical historical method of exegesis because we deal with texts. This is what we have. We need to examine them in every way that we possibly can. But getting the meaning of a text is not about being counting. Okay, no meaning of any passage is going to hinge on how many times an author uses a lemma. But that's the way we're taught that has, that's useful depending on how you use the data, okay? But word counts, okay, even syllable counts, statistics, they are not going to get you where you need to go in a number of cases. And in fact, they could actually mislead you. They could actually become obstacles to being able to think widely and being able to think more abstractly unless that idea scare you. Let me put it this way. Being able to think like an Israelite would have thought. I mean, there are lots of people in the church when they come across Leviathan, they think of a dinosaur because they've been taught that. Nobody in Israel is thinking of a dinosaur when they come across Leviathan, nobody. Even if they believe that there was a great sea dragon out there somewhere that could have, could chomp down on their ship, they know what Leviathan means. It means uncontrolled chaos and bad stuff that can happen to you. It's a metaphor. Even if they assign reality to the metaphor, it's still a metaphor. It still operates on that level. We just don't read stuff that way because we're modern. So I actually think our lack of modernity and in some cases our resistance to a supernatural worldview of the Bible generally has made the census planor idea a tougher pill to swallow than it ought to be. So again, consider this a forewarning. We're gonna run into passages like this. And again, I would never say. And I would not say, and Hagnert, I don't think it lands here. I mean, I think, again, he needs to, what he says needs to be qualified a little bit, which is why I'm doing it, why I'm adding these two thoughts. But again, just go back to the little diddy. The Old Testament can mean more than what the Old Testament writer could have had in their head, okay? I'll grant that, even though I think a lot of the stuff that scholars think that the Old Testament writer didn't know, they may have had floating around in their heads because they read a text a different way. They could read it again against the broad ancient Near Eastern backdrop. But I'll still grant, I'll still grant that there are things in the New Testament because of Christ. Again, the specific outcome of themes like kingship and messiahship. Royal ruling and priestly mediation and cosmic mountain stuff. Divine council, family metaphor, okay? We know that that has its ultimate culminative endpoint in Christ, we know that. And so I'm not saying the Old Testament writer could have known that, but they could have known a lot more about that because they're linking what they're writing back into that world. So I think they deserve more credit. The Old Testament guys deserve more credit than Hagner's giving them, than other scholars give them. But we'll admit that, yeah, there are some things that it just, they couldn't have known the specifics about Jesus of Nazareth and how this played out. I get it. So the Old Testament could mean more than what the authors could have thought. But it is not gonna mean less. It's not gonna be violated, it's not gonna be contradictory. The New Testament meaning that it extracts is not going to be contradictory to something that could have been discerned if you were an Israelite living in an Old Testament world. Okay, that's the part I'm sort of objecting to and I think needs to be qualified. Yep, they couldn't have known every precise point because that requires Jesus. But the stuff that the New Testament writers are saying about Jesus are going to in fact be linkable to an Old Testament worldview. That Old Testament writers really could have discerned and really could have had floating around their heads, but we don't. And so we think they didn't see it either. And I don't think that's the case. I think we need to give the Old Testament a little more cred than a lot of scholars give it. But again, we are moderns and we are taught to think about text in certain ways. We do not read the Old Testament like Israelites read or Israelites read those books. We need to do that. The more we do that, I think the census plenor will actually make more sense. We'll actually be able to see how someone could have thought that way. We've already seen a little bit of that with Melchizedek. Again, you look at some of the stuff said about Melchizedek in the New Testament, you know, this whole, you know, just the way he's described and you go back in the Old Testament, well, none of that's in the Old Testament. Well, it depends on how you think about what's written in the Old Testament. If you're just thinking about words and looking up meanings of the words in dictionaries, then you might have a problem. If you're able to understand those words against the backdrop of a certain worldview, then the journey's not so far. So we're gonna run into stuff in the book of Hebrews that is gonna take us down a lot of these paths. I think I can safely say it's gonna be interesting. You're gonna see things in the text that you may not have seen before and you're gonna certainly, I think, be forced to think thoughts. You have to go through a thought process that you haven't gone through before in relationship of the Old and then the New Testament. And so for this audience, I think that's gonna be fun. Think what we'll learn a lot. And again, I hope we'll become more appreciative about how to sort of get away from the rigid blinders on sort of literalistic approach to the biblical text. Because you're gonna learn it when we study this book. That is not what they were doing. The writer of Hebrews is just gonna blow your mind. If you're a rigid literalist like that, he's gonna lose you pretty quickly. You've got to be able to think outside of that box. And again, try to think more abstractly again. Try to set the ideas against the backdrop of the ancient Near Eastern world. And if you can do that, you're gonna see how the writer could get where he landed and how Christ is a big factor in that and how it doesn't violate the Old Testament itself. All right, Mike, we will be looking forward to chapter one next week. And- Good stuff. It will be- And it's angels, angels already. I mean, how can you not wanna talk about angels? Absolutely. There you go. Absolutely, we're looking forward to it, Mike. All right, Mike, what I just wanna remind everybody out there, if you haven't subscribed to our podcast, please do so at Google Play or iTunes or anywhere else you subscribe to our podcast. If you can, leave a review. For this book of Hebrews, please grab a friend, neighbor, maybe your neighbor's dog cat, I don't know, somebody to listen to the podcast with. So it's a good time to jump on board with the book of Hebrews. So all right, Mike, well, with that, I just wanna thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.ermsh.com.