Thus when some glimmer of those [Christian] origins [according to orthodoxy] seems to lie buried in the text, it is understandable that it will be seized upon. Such a glimmer is thought to be found at the opening of chapter 12.
2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith,
who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame,
and has sat down at the right hand of God’s throne.
3 For consider him who has endured such hostility/rebellion from sinful men,
so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
This bare mention of the cross does nothing to elucidate the nature and location of the crucifixion, whether earthly or heavenly, and there is not an echo of the resurrection in flesh. Verse 3 might be a little more problematic. Is this a reference to the Sanhedrin, or Pilate, or the Pharisees, or perhaps those who took part in his execution? We must first realize that the idea is offered in order to provide a parallel to the experience of the readers who themselves have been subjected to persecution by “sinful men.” To serve this purpose, the author need merely have some scriptural precedent in mind which he could identify with the Son. Note, too, that the reference is quite vague: “endured hostility”; specifics such as abuse by the Sanhedrin or scourging by the Romans would have made all the difference here. Alternatively, God himself certainly endured the hostility or rebellion of sinful men in the course of scriptural history, so it would not be a stretch for the author to imagine that the Son, too, could be thought of as having suffered the same thing, again derived from scripture.
2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith,
who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame,
and has sat down at the right hand of God’s throne.
3 For consider him who has endured such hostility/rebellion from sinful men,
so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
This bare mention of the cross does nothing to elucidate the nature and location of the crucifixion, whether earthly or heavenly, and there is not an echo of the resurrection in flesh. Verse 3 might be a little more problematic. Is this a reference to the Sanhedrin, or Pilate, or the Pharisees, or perhaps those who took part in his execution? We must first realize that the idea is offered in order to provide a parallel to the experience of the readers who themselves have been subjected to persecution by “sinful men.” To serve this purpose, the author need merely have some scriptural precedent in mind which he could identify with the Son. Note, too, that the reference is quite vague: “endured hostility”; specifics such as abuse by the Sanhedrin or scourging by the Romans would have made all the difference here. Alternatively, God himself certainly endured the hostility or rebellion of sinful men in the course of scriptural history, so it would not be a stretch for the author to imagine that the Son, too, could be thought of as having suffered the same thing, again derived from scripture.
He goes on even to propose tentatively that a slightly attested manuscript variant might be the original reading, that hostility against him by those who sin might have originally read hostility by those who sin against themselves.
But, if the purpose is to point out that this passage contains no necessary reference to the abuse of Jesus at the hands of overzealous Roman soldiers as described in the gospels, we need look no further than the word translated as hostility/rebellion in the passage as Doherty renders it: αντιλογια. The word, at its most basic, simply means contradiction. We find a good usage of it in Psalm 106.32 (105.32 LXX):
They also provoked him to wrath at the waters of contradiction [Greek αντιλογια; Hebrew Meribah, the place of strife], so that it went hard with Moses on their account.
When we turn back to Exodus 17.3 to see what it was that the people actually did, we find that they murmered. They grumbled. They contradicted or questioned both Moses and the Lord.
Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer writes:
ἀντιλογία, however, denotes nothing else than contradiction; and what is meant is, the contending against Christ’s divine Sonship and Messianic dignity. The notion of opposition and ill-usage in act, which is ordinarily assigned to it (still also by Böhme, Bleek, de Wette, Tholuck, Bloomfield, Delitzsch, Alford, and Maier) along with that of contradiction, this word never has. Even ἀντιλέγειν, to which appeal is made, has nowhere the sense of a hostile resistance manifesting itself in outward actions.
Quite a bit of allowance could even be made here for overstatement on the part of Meyer and the point would still stand: the most that we are entitled to read into 12.3 is that Jesus has sometimes endured conceptual or verbal abuse from sinful humans. None of the physical abuse from the gospel accounts of the passion need be skulking in the background. It is quite unnecessary to appeal, with Doherty, to the vagueness of the hostility expressed in 12.3. The most likely kind of hostility, conceptual or verbal as opposed to physical, is enough, IMHO.
Ben.