Let's Get Weird!

Key takeaways

• Hebrews 1 was written to Jewish Christians, probably 70–100 CE, by an unknown author. Despite persistent attribution to Paul, scholars dismiss Pauline authorship. The letter targets people who have not yet accepted Jesus as Messiah, arguing that Jesus supersedes the Jewish tradition they inherited. Its Greek opening verse contains five words beginning with "P"—polymeros, polytropos, palae, patrasen, profites—a heavy alliterative device that disappears entirely in English translation and signals a rhetorically sophisticated author more interested in persuasion than settled doctrine.

• The chapter's core argument depends on reinterpreting Hebrew Bible passages that were never about Jesus. Hebrews 1 strings together quotations from Psalms 2, 45, 97, 102, and 110, and from Deuteronomy 32, presenting them as God's own words about the Son. In their original contexts, these passages address Davidic kings, the God of Israel himself, or natural forces. The author reads them messianically—a standard interpretive move in Greco-Roman period Judaism—but strips away the contextual markers that identify the original referents.

• The "Son bears the divine name" argument borrows directly from Jewish angel theology. Hebrews 1:4 claims Jesus inherited a name more excellent than the angels. This mirrors a tradition in rabbinic texts about Metatron, an exalted angel described as the "lesser Adonai" whose name matches his master's. The Philippians 2 hymn and the Gospel of John reflect the same thinking. Hebrews takes that name-bearing-angel tradition and argues Jesus has a stronger claim to it than any angel does.

• The Christology in Hebrews 1 supports both Trinitarian and non-Trinitarian readings, which reflects genuine ambiguity in the text. Psalm 45 addresses a Davidic king with the vocative "O God"—the passage the author uses to show God calling Jesus "God." But in the original Hebrew, calling a king elohim reflects positional, relational divinity, the same register in which Exodus 7:1 calls Moses "a god to Pharaoh." The chapter positions Jesus below God but superior to all other heavenly beings. It does not simply assert that Jesus is God; it argues the case through a series of comparative quotations, which would be unnecessary if identity with God were the point.

• The Shepherd of Hermas was nearly canonical and remains one of the strangest surviving early Christian texts. Written somewhere between 70 and 150 CE, it appears in Codex Sinaiticus alongside the New Testament. Clement of Alexandria cited it as inspired; Origen admired it; only Tertullian's objections and the firming of the canon in the late fourth century kept it out. Alongside the Epistle of Barnabas, it came closer to canonization than any other excluded text. Its three-part structure—five visions, twelve commandments, ten similitudes—deliberately parallels New Testament genres.

• The Shepherd builds a communal Christian ethic through allegory, and one of its commandments drew fierce opposition. The commandments cover honesty, sexual purity, almsgiving, and avoiding slander. The similitudes use parables to reinforce the same themes, including a directive to spend wealth helping the poor rather than buying land. The book also instructs a Christian husband to reconcile with and remarry a wife who committed adultery if she repents—a position that outraged many early church fathers and contributed significantly to the book's contested reputation. Jesus is never named anywhere in the text.

Notable moments

• McClellan points out that the Deuteronomy 32:43 passage, which originally says "worship him all gods" in Hebrew, gets rendered as "sons of God" or "angels of God" in the Septuagint, and Hebrews then uses it to argue the angels must worship the Son—a chain of translation choices that moves the passage far from its source.

• Beecher, after learning the quotations in Hebrews 1 came from the Psalms: "Oh no, these aren't originally about Jesus. They're just being leveraged in a different way."

• Beecher cuts to the actual argument of Hebrews 1: "The argument is Jesus is below God, but above all the other sort of heavenly beings or divine beings."

• On the recycling of scripture, Beecher observes: "I guess taking Bible verses out of context is a time-honored tradition that even happened in the Bible."

• The Shepherd of Hermas opens with Hermas spotting his former enslaver Rhoda bathing in the Tiber, pulling her out, and thinking he would be happy to have a wife as beautiful and good as she is—a thought the next vision treats as sinful desire, with Rhoda appearing from heaven to rebuke him on God's behalf.

• McClellan describes the Shepherd's tone relative to Revelation: "This feels like it was written by John of Patmos's better-adjusted brother. Still not all there. Still weird, but not apocalyptic. Just: be nice."

• McClellan says if he could swap one canonical book for the Shepherd of Hermas, he would—and Revelation would be the one to go.

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