No Foot Steps Heard

Finally, there is a startling statement made in chapter 8, one which most commentators manage to gloss over or ignore completely. The writer is speaking of Jesus’ ministry in the heavenly sanctuary and begins to compare him to the earthly high priest. At verse 4, he says:

Now, if he had been on earth, he would not even have been a priest . . .
No matter how one tries to detect a feasible qualification to this phrase, there is no denying that the writer seems to be saying that Jesus was never on earth. The Greek is “ei men oun en epi ges,” which is literally: “Now, if accordingly he were on earth . . .” The verb en is the imperfect, which is strictly speaking a past tense, and the NEB (above) chooses to reflect this. But the meaning within the context is probably present, or at least temporally ambiguous, much like the conditional sense in which most other translations render it: “Now if he were on earth (meaning at this time), he would not be a priest.”
However, the writer has qualified this statement in no way whatever. He does not say, if he were now on earth (instead of earlier), if he returned to earth, if he were still on earth; not even: “While he was on earth, he was not a priest . . .” The writer says nothing which shows any cognizance of the fact that Jesus had been on earth, recently, that it was on earth where an important part of his sacrifice, the shedding of his blood, had occurred. (In contrast to scholars, who regularly feel constrained to point this out.)

The point he is making in this verse is that Jesus on earth would have nothing to do, since there are already earthly priests performing the duties which the Law prescribes, and they do so “in a sanctuary which is only a copy and shadow of the heavenly” (8:5). Yet how could any writer say that Jesus would have nothing to do on earth when he did, in fact, have so much to do? How could he imply that earth is the scene only of human duties in a human sanctuary when here was where Jesus had performed his sacrifice, shed his blood—on a hill called Calvary outside Jerusalem? Surely no writer could express himself this way without at least a qualification, something which would give a nod to Jesus’ recent presence in the physical arena. (Of course, such a life and death on earth, as noted earlier, would have thrown a monkeywrench into his carefully crafted Platonic picture.)

Ellingworth has glimpsed the edge of the abyss, and hastily drawn back. In analyzing this passage (op cit., p.405), he questions the normal interpretation of the imperfect en, and with it the NEB translation (which he admits “is grammatically possible”), because it “could be misunderstood as meaning that Jesus had never ‘been on earth’.” He claims that this “goes against the context”—which is to say the common assumption over the last 19 centuries that an historical Jesus existed, one who had in fact been on earth. In the face of the overwhelming evidence which Hebrews alone provides, it is time to question that very assumption, rather than try to reject the natural meaning of an innocent verb.

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever,” the author intones in 13:8. Could a divine Son, pre-existent in heaven before his incarnation, who was born fully human in Bethlehem in the days of Herod the Great, who grew up and ministered in Galilee, was slain in Jerusalem and rose bodily from the dead to return to heaven—could he be spoken of in this fashion? But of a mythical Christ who operated entirely in the spiritual sphere, in a timeless, Platonic existence, one who had never been to earth and was known only by divine revelation from the pages of scripture, such an affirmation would be perfectly apt.

See the supplemental articles at the end of this page.