Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

And so now part two of this, part two of this, it's St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews.

Right.

So this is the next big element here is the genre question.

Why is that a question? This has always been called St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews. Well, eventually someday, maybe not till next week, when we

start the actual text of St. Paul's Epistle of the Hebrews, we'll notice, and you can glance

down and look right now. You'll see, it does not begin the way

St. Paul's epistles begin. I mean, we've seen over and over again now. It's been a few years

now. We've been working through St. Paul's epistles. He starts his epistles pretty much the

same way every time, right? He identifies himself, Paul and apostle. You know, he says, greetings, name of the Lord. Right? He identifies himself, Paul and Apostle, you know, he says greetings, name of the Lord,

right? He has the whole intro. That's more or less the way everybody started to play.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was a normal form of letter introduction, and we talked about how St. Paul

would use that. He'd sort of seed the themes for the letter into that and then develop them over the course

of the letter. There is no introduction on the front of this. It just goes straight into it.

It just starts with God who at various times and in various ways. So we don't have any kind of

epistle introduction. We do at the end have something

that looks like one of his closings. It even mentioned St. Timothy. So we do have sort of a

closing at the end.

So that draws into question then.

We have to ask, well, wait, did we lose the intro?

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