an exact imprint: the precise impression a stamp leaves behind, reproducing what made it feature for feature
The word belongs to the world of coins and seals. A craftsman cut a design into a hard metal stamp, called a die; when the die was struck onto a blank piece of silver, the coin came away carrying that design exactly. The word first named the cutting tool, but by the first century it usually named what the tool produced: the impression itself. The picture is not a likeness someone sketched from memory but a precise transfer, line for line.
Greek writers stretched that picture in several directions, and each of them is about a telling, recognizable mark:
- the design a die leaves on a struck coin
- the cast of a face or the accent of a dialect
- the recognizable style of a writer or of a whole way of life
Second Maccabees uses it of the Greek way of life, the stamp a culture presses onto the people who adopt it, and the philosopher Theophrastus used it as the title of a famous set of sketches of human types, which is the road by which English got the word "character". Those wider uses are real, but the one New Testament verse activates the narrower and sharper one: the impression a die leaves.
In Hebrews 1:3 the Son is called the exact imprint of God's very being, and the picture says two things at once. The imprint matches its source completely, so whatever God is, the Son is. Yet an imprint is also a distinct thing from the die that made it, and it comes from that die, so the Son is not simply another name for the Father. Writers on Hebrews press the point that the comparison is about exactness rather than rank: a struck coin is not lesser silver than the die that struck it.
Softer words were available and were not chosen. The ordinary words for "image" (εἰκών) and "likeness" (ὁμοίωμα) can describe a copy that falls short of what it copies, and the word for the "form" something wears (μορφή) says nothing about exactness. This word presses harder, toward feature for feature correspondence, which is why later Christian writers reached for Hebrews 1:3 when they argued that the Son shares the Father's own nature. Hebrews pairs it in the same sentence with the word for radiance streaming off a light (ἀπαύγασμα), an echo of Wisdom of Solomon, where God's wisdom is called the radiance of eternal light.
Disputed
How much Alexandrian Jewish philosophy stands behind the choice of χαρακτήρ at Hebrews 1:3, and whether the author drew directly on Philo.
- majorityHebrews and Philo share a common Hellenistic Jewish and Middle Platonic thought world without literary dependence; the demonstrable anchor is Wisdom of Solomon 7:25 and 26, since the companion noun ἀπαύγασμα occurs in the Greek Bible only there and at Hebrews 1:3.; Kenneth L. Schenck, Cosmology and Eschatology in Hebrews: The Settings of the Sacrifice (Cambridge University Press, 2007); James W. Thompson, The Beginnings of Christian Philosophy: The Epistle to the Hebrews (Catholic Biblical Association, 1982); Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1989), on 1:3
- minorityThe author writes as a Philonist converted to Christianity, so the imprint and radiance language of Hebrews 1:3 comes essentially out of Philo's Logos and Wisdom speculation.; Ceslas Spicq, L'Épître aux Hébreux (Études bibliques; Gabalda, 1952 to 1953), on the Philonism of the epistle
- minorityThere is no direct borrowing from Philo at all, in doctrine or vocabulary; the switch to χαρακτήρ tells against dependence, since Philo characteristically calls the Logos the εἰκών of God.; Ronald Williamson, Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews (Arbeiten zur Literatur und Geschichte des hellenistischen Judentums 4; Brill, 1970)