428 Part 9: Letters everything and everyone else. The very first sentence sets the stage. God spoke in the past in many different ways, but God has spoken supremely in his Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus is God’s final word to humanity. Everything God wanted to say, he said in Jesus. Maybe that’s why the human author never signed his name to this book. He wanted the attention to be focused on Jesus. The author quoted about one hundred times from the Old Testament in his writing, but he never once identified the human writer of an Old Testament book by name. He wanted all of us who read his book to realize that when we listen to the Bible, we are listening to God. God still speaks through his Son and through his Book. We can make a pretty reasonable guess about the Christians who first heard this book read. They were a group of Jewish people who had come to believe in Jesus as their Messiah and Lord. They had never seen Jesus, but they had believed in him. Their faith in Jesus had brought them hardship and painful confrontations. Their own families had rejected
CHRISTIANS UNDER FIRE Most students of the book of Hebrews believe that the Jewish Christians who first read or heard this message lived in Rome. The author referred to an earlier time of suffering (10:32 – 34). His description fits well into the hardships that Jewish Christians suffered under the Roman emperor Claudius in AD 49. The Roman historian Suetonius wrote that “there were riots in the Jewish quarter at the instigation of Chrestus. As a result, Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome.” The name Chrestus is probably a corruption of Christos or Christ. The banishment of Jewish Christians from the synagogues created an explosive situation among the Jews. The emperor simply expelled them all. When the author wrote Hebrews, fifteen years had passed since this expulsion.
New persecution under Emperor Nero was looming. No Christian had been killed yet, but martyrdom would come soon enough (12:4). Nero blamed the Christians for a fire in Rome in AD 64. Nero probably hired thugs to set the fire, but he needed a scapegoat. Many Christians died in Nero’s persecution, including the apostles Peter and Paul. Since Nero’s day hundreds of thousands of Christians have died for their faith. What you may not realize is that the century in which most Christians were martyred was not the first or second century when Christians were thrown to lions in Roman arenas. More Christians died in the twentieth century for their faith than in any other century before, and the twenty-first century doesn’t look like it will be much better.