Rosalie Bertell, a cancer specialist, calculates that 13 million people in the world have died of fallout since the War.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Poor Men, Jesus and Christianity 4

Christians cannot escape from the fact that, in Jesus’s parable of Dives and Lazarus, we are the rich man, clothed and fed in comfort, and also guilty of appalling negligence concerning the starving and sick man at our gate… We have ignored the insistent theme throughout the scriptures—that God has always been on the side of the poor.
Rev David C K Watson

Ebionites and the Early Church

Abstract

Origen classified the Ebionites as those who believed in the virgin birth and those who rejected it. Both the Jewish sabbath and the Christian Lord’s Day were holy to them, and they expected the establishment of a messianic kingdom in Jerusalem. Eusebius describes as Ebionites those who held the brother of Jesus, James the Just, in special regard. They had no regard at all for Paul, and Christ was not divine but a plain, naturally conceived man who achieved righteousness through his character. Can it be coincidence that “The Poor Ones” was a name of the followers of James in the Jerusalem Church in the New Testament? Paul claims the only condition James imposed upon him in his missions to the gentiles was to remember the poor. He is reminding him to send money not for any poor but for “The Poor”, the Nazarenes, who, after the defeated uprising, had a lot of widows to support.

Ebionites and the Early Church

“Ebionite” emerges as the name used in the second and third centuries for a sect of Jewish Christians who had not rejected Judaism. If Acts reflects the Jerusalem Church, it shows a zeal for the Law of Moses among the earliest Christians. The first Christians were, do not forget, Jews. After the fall of Jerusalem (70 AD), the church regrouped at Pella under bishop Symeon (d 106 AD). These first Christians had expected a judgement predicted by Christ and had fled. Sixty years on, they refused to take part in the struggle of Bar Kosiba (132 AD) against the Romans because he could not have been the true messiah to a Christian. This is when the sect is said to have started. In 135 AD during the uprising of Bar Kosiba, the Jerusalem Church was dispersed by the Roman emperor Hadrian and fled east across the river Jordan into Peræa. Perhaps so, but it cannot be when the sect began—they already existed before then—but Christians assume them to have been a type of early Christianity. In a sense they were, but the earliest Christianity was Essenism. Cut off by the Romans and later the Moslems from the centre of Christianity in the West, they retained their Essenic beliefs.

After another messianic rebellion and bloody defeat, Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem, and Hadrian forbade traditional Jewish rites. Gentile Christianity in the second century was busy casting off as much Judaism as it could while retaining the Jewish scriptures. So the Christians assented to Hadrian’s new rules to distinguish themselves from the Jews in the eyes of the Romans, and showed they meant it by electing an uncircumcised gentile as their bishop (Eusebius, HE 4:6). The outcome was that Jewish Christians of the Jerusalem Church split. Some Ebionites left Christianity to return to Judaism, some tried to remain as both Jews and as Christians, getting no support from either, but perhaps some respect as a devout minority. Later bent scholars called them Pharisaic Ebionites, after their adherence to Judaism and to make them clear enemies of Christ, though they had nothing to do with the Pharisees. Jesus shows from his speech that he was an Ebionite himself, but he disparaged the Pharisees.

Tertullian (DPr 33; DCC 14:18), Hippolytus and Epiphanius (H 30) propagated the falsehood that a man called Ebion, supposedly a pupil of Cerinthus, founded the sect, and the gospel John was directed against them both. Ebionism had no founder by that name, unless it was used as an honorary title of Jesus Christ or an earlier Righteous Teacher, but it was undoubtedly founded in Palestine, and existed at the beginning of the Christian Church.

Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew (ch 47), about 140 AD, speaks of two sects of Jewish Christians estranged from the Church. One observed the Mosaic Law for themselves, but did not require others to observe it, while the others held the Mosaic law to be universally necessary. But Justin did not name them. Hippolytus (c 225-235 AD) and Tertullian described them similarly. According to the second century Christian, Irenaeus (c 180-190 AD—AH 1:24:2; 3:21:2; 4:33:4; 5:1:3), Ebionites:

denied the divinity and the virginal birth of Christ
clung to the observance of the Jewish Law
regarded S Paul as an apostate
used only a gospel according to Matthew

Like Cerinthus and Carpocrates, the Ebionites differed from gentile Christians in accepting Jesus Christ as the messiah and the greatest of the prophets, but not as the “virgin born” Son of God. Christ was “the Son of Joseph and Mary according to the ordinary course of human generation”. He became one with God in the baptism and remained so until his crucifixion. They did not view Jesus’s death as a bloody act of atonement. They interpreted the Eucharist as a memorial of Jesus, using a chalice of water for the chalice of blood, and were vegetarians, rejecting temple sacrifices. They practised a rigorous asceticism and stressed the binding character of the Mosaic Law, and considered Paul an apostate for having declared the supremacy of Christian teaching over it.

Tertullian said, to them, Christ was “a mere man, nothing more than a descendant of David, and not also the Son of God”. He had not been born of a virgin, a gentile invention, but his baptism changed him. In the Gospel according to the Hebrews a voice from heaven said, besides the words recorded by Matthew, “This day have I begotten thee” (Ps 2:7). According to Epiphanius (H 30:13), a bright light filled the place and John the Baptist asked, “Who art Thou, Lord?”. The voice gave the same reply. Then it was that John prostrated himself at the feet of Jesus asking him to baptize the baptizer, as in the canonical gospel. He did not become Christ until his baptism (Justin Martyr, Tryph 49). He had the power needed to fulfil His mission as messiah, but remained a man nonetheless.

The third century Christian apologist, Origen, classified the Ebionites in two groups, those who believed in the virgin birth and those who rejected it. Both the Jewish sabbath and the Christian Lord’s Day were holy to them, and they expected the establishment of a messianic kingdom in Jerusalem. In his Ecclesiastical History written in the fourth century, Eusebius also describes the Ebionites who held the brother of Jesus, James the Just, in special regard. They held Christ not to be divine but a plain and ordinary man, naturally conceived and notable for achieving righteousness through his character. They did not accept that faith was sufficient to save and were therefore careful to observe the law in addition—they evinced great zeal to observe the literal sense of the law. They had no regard at all for Paul. Until the fifth century, remnants of the sect still existed in Palestine and Syria, and it seems certain that the Christians who influenced Mohammed in the seventh century were Ebionites. They were the remnants of the Jerusalem Church of James the Just perpetuating the name used by the Nazarenes, the Essenes and James himself.

Ebionites were known by several names. Because they rejected the divinity of Christ, Ebionites were called “Homuncionites” (Gk Anthropians, Anthropolatrians). Because they settled across the Jordan in Peræa, they were called “Peratici” (reminiscent of the name of the medieval heretical sect of “Patarenes”). And because they had a prominent leader called Symmachus who made his own translation of the Hebrew bible to avoid the Septuagint used by the gentiles, they were called Symmachians.

The strict Ebionites remembered the tradition passed down to them that Jesus was not a god, but was nevertheless a great and brave Jew. They recognized, what gentile Christians refused to recognize, that Jesus had tried but failed to anticipate the Day of God’s Vengeance. It showed he was human. As Tertullian put it, Jesus was a great man but “nothing more than a Solomon or a Jonas”(DCC 18). Ebionites were Essenes and had to return to their arcane studies to try to anticipate when God would come with His army of angels. They had to continue trying to be righteous under the law, something that Christians did not have to be, and soon lost, having no proper criterion of righteousness. They continued to expect that God would visit Jerusalem to cleanse it, in preparation for cleansing the world, and, of course, now a gentile city, it needed it. It would be restored in the millennial kingdom of messiah, and Jews would reign there as the chosen people of God, visited by all the nations of earth in submission.

The failure of Jesus in Gethsemane and his subsequent crucifixion, then another failure to arrive at the time of the Jewish War, meant the coming of the messiah had to be deferred until the millennium. Ebionites pointed to Christ’s regard for the law (Mt 5:17; 26:55; John 7:14), to show he never abrogated it as gentile Christians claimed. Eusebius (HE 6:17) probably made his description far closer to the Pharisaic view than the true Ebionite one to emphasise the Judaizing he claimed had happened. But Justin Martyr (Tryph 47) said they continued to refuse hospitality with gentiles, as one would expect of Essenes. They cited Matthew 10:24-25 in criticism of the gentile church for ignoring what Jesus had said, and said they “would be imitators of Christ”. Their mark of Christ was fulfilment of the law. Fascinatingly, in the light of the beliefs of the Cathars, they argued that men were generally not perfect enough to obey the law properly, but “had any one else fulfilled the commandments of the Law, he would have been the Christ”. Hippolytus (ROH 7:34) adds “when Ebionites thus fulfil the law, they are able to become Christs”.

Origen (c 254 AD) notes the difference between the two types of Ebionites (CC 5:61), as does Eusebius (c 340 AD—HE 3:27)—the more westernized type accepted the virginal birth of Christ, while rejecting his pre-existence and divinity, but reserved sunday as a Christian memorial of Christ’s resurrection while still observing the Jewish sabbath. Mostly, though, Ebionites were associated with denying the virgin birth so scholars have concluded that the westernized branch were a minority. Epiphanius calls the more heretical sect Ebionites, and the more gentile, Nazarenes. The Apostolical Constitutions (6:2) traced them back to apostolic times, and Theodoret (HF 2:2) put them in the reign of Domitian (81-96 AD), so some accept the distinction between Nazarenes and Ebionites goes back to the earliest days of Christianity.

They reviled Paul, and Paul knew it, as his references to the words of the Judaizers in Corinthians and Galatians show. They said he taught directly against Peter, James, and John, and a careful reading of the Epistles and Acts confirms a disagreement. Jesus Christ had not called Paul himself, and so he was a false apostle, his supposed encounter with the spirit of Christ being a ploy to give himself some apostolic authority. They said he was neither “called of Jesus Christ Himself”, nor trained in the Church of Jerusalem. He had misapplied their own word, “deceiver”, or more bluntly, “liar”, twisting it against them when it properly applied to himself (2 Cor 6:8). He it was who offered God’s word for sale. He proclaimed deliverance from the Law to please men, and commended himself. He walked according to the flesh, puffed up with pride and constantly pleading for his honesty. His constant pleas actually suggest a basis for the unseen accusations they presume. He was an “apostate from the Law”, and was not even a Jew by birth.

Irenaeus says they used Matthew as a gospel. Eusebius says they used the Gospel according to the Hebrews written in Hebrew letters, known also by Hegesippus, Origen and Clement of Alexandria. It seems the two were the same. Epiphanius says the Nazarenes used the Gospel according to the Hebrews, and the strict Ebionites had an “incomplete, falsified, and truncated copy” of it. This incomplete Gospel according to the Hebrews was surely the Aramaic original of Matthew consisting of what the scholars call “Q”, a collection of sayings like the gospel of Thomas. Jerome translated the Ebionite gospel into Greek and Latin and declared it the same as the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles and the Gospel of the Nazarenes. Of course, it did not have the first two chapters describing the supernatural birth of Jesus, but does that mean they had omitted it on purpose, or that the gentile Church had added it? The latter is certain. They also revered the Protevangelium Jacobi and the Periodoi tou Petrou, so obviously respected James and Peter.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.