Schoolboy sense—A Protestant is not a Roman Catholic. A Roman Catholic believes what the Pope says, but Protestants believe what they like.

The Poor Men, Jesus and Christianity 5

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

Gnostic Ebionites
Early Church
Summary

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.

Gnostic Ebionites

When it comes to the gnostic Ebionites, Christian apologists always claim the sect had come about from external influences, rather than that it was the source of much gnostic thought. J P Arendzen, in the CE, notes that a gnostic development of the heresy later came from the Judaistic Ebionites. They differed from most gnostics in maintaining Yehouah the Demiurge as the Supreme Good God. On this ground, some refuse to consider the Ebionites as having been gnostic, though their general teaching (as expressed in the pseudo-Clementine works) is gnostic.

The unreliable Epiphanius (AH 30) is the chief authority on the gnostic Ebionites. Having met them in Cyprus, he knew about them personally. They considered their own brand of Christianity to the original primitive Judaism of Moses, free of later accretions and the additions of the the later books of the Jewish scriptures. Prophets were distinguished as true ones or those who were not true but commendable. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Aaron, Moses, and Jesus were true ones, while David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so on were of a lesser quality. Like the Samaritans, they accepted the Pentateuch alone among the Jewish scriptures. They identified Jesus as “That Prophet” spoken of by Moses, saying their gospel said, “I am He concerning Whom Moses prophesied, saying, A prophet shall the Lord God raise unto you like unto me” (Clem Hom 3:53), and this showed his teaching was that of the original Moses. There is much of Persian Dualism in this gnostic system, and it has come into Christianity. It is difficult indeed to imagine that the dualism was not original, but has been expunged from Judaism since. They believed that:

Matter is eternal, an emanation of God, constituting His body.
Creation is transformation of the eternal matter by God’s wisdom, Logos or Sophia, but this is not different from God as the Christian Son is somehow considered to be. Sophia produces the world by emanations of syzygies, the female emerging before the male but overcome by him.
God had appointed two antagonists, Christ and Satan, and so the world was divided into Good and Evil. Christ, the Son of God ruled the good, and the world to come, but Satan was the prince of this world—the Prince of Evil (John 14:30; Eph 1:21; 6:12). Neither is a god.
Adam was the bearer of the first revelation, Moses of the second, Christ of the third and perfect one. How Christ relates to Jesus is not clear.
Salvation is by Knowledge, Gnosis, by believing in God the Teacher enabling the precepts of the law to be obeyed, and by being baptized unto remission of sins.
Christ shall come again to triumph over Antichrist as light dispels darkness.

Some said Christ was a creature, not a son of God, a Spirit higher than the angels. Like an Indian Avatar, he came to earth when he wished and in different forms. He had appeared as Adam, to the patriarchs in bodily shape. Others equated Adam and Christ. He had come as Jesus, who was, to the Ebionites a successor of Moses, and not divine. But they had no moment of union of Christ with Jesus, thus leaving it open that he was divine or at least miraculous.

They were strictly ascetic, and vegetarian, rejecting scriptural passages like Genesis 18:8 that speak of flesh eating. They also refused wine, using unleavened bread and water for their sacred meal. They revered water as being “in the place of a god”. Bathing was essential and often, a clear enough link with the Essenes, or one of their lustrating offshoots. They also disdained the Jewish temple, just like the Essenes. However, the fact that they honoured marriage and preferred early marriages, suggests either that they sprouted from the village Essenes or had began themselves, like the Christians to adapt to western imperatives. They observed both sunday as the Lord’s Day and saturday as the sabbath. They retained the covenant of Abraham and of Jesus Christ of circumcision, eschewing fellowship with the uncircumcised. Like the original Ebionites, they abhorred and discredited Paul and his epistles.

The gnostic Ebionites, like the Christians, were zealous missionaries and writers of books. The Book of Elchasai and the Clementine Books came out of the Ebionites. In them Jesus and his apostles appear as much more Essenic in character than they do in the gospels and letters that have come to us in the Christian New Testament. Plainly one or the other has been altered, and there seems little doubt which it is. Jesus, Peter, Matthew, and James the Just were Essenes. The Clementine Homilies and Recognitions incorporate additional works of the Ebionites under the sections called Peter’s Peripatetic Sermons. They propagate the Ebionite view of the supremacy of James, gnosis, and their antagonism to Simon Magus. The Clementine Recognitions, in Rufinus’s translation, according to Arendzen (CE sv “Ebionites”), are more Catholic than the Homilies.

The book of Elchesai—who is said to have “preached unto men a new remission of sins, in the third year (101 AD) of Trajan’s reign”—or The Hidden power was written about 100 AD and brought to Rome about 217 AD by Alcibiades of Apamea (Syria). Hippolytus (H 9:8,12) denounced his teaching of Elchasai, from the book, as that of “a wolf risen up in our own day against many wandering sheep, whom Callistus had scattered abroad”, and said many “became victims of the delusion”. Less than two centuries after Jesus, Roman Christians had forgotten their origins, or pretended to do so, as too embarrassing. The book was said to have been in imitation of Callistus. It was the book of the Elchesaites, or Symmachiani in the west, those who accepted a new baptism. Little is known about them. Their influence might be traceable amongst the Mandeans.

A few Ebionites were left in the time of Theodoret, about the middle of the fifth century, the rest having died out, returned to Judaism and, perhaps, a few became Catholic Christians, though it does not seem likely to be many. Ebionite Christianity in the east seems likely to have lasted until the arrival of the Moslems, and indeed, is likely to have influenced Mohammed, though for centuries it had disappeared from western view. So, it was far from unimportant as modern Christians are at pains to make out in their effort to suggest that a short lived version of Christianity, like Judaism, could not have had God’s imprimatur.

Outside of Palestine, the writings of Paul and, supposedly, John excluded Ebionism from Asia Minor, but eventually it got there. Centuries later, much of gnostic Ebionism arrived in Europe from Armenia and Asia Minor as the Paulicians and Bogomils.

Early Church

We have seen that Paul had the same communistic ideas as the Nazarenes. He was explicitly described as a “ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” in Acts by an advocate trying him before the governor, Felix. Other early Christian works have the same principles encoded in them, and plainly they must have been a strong reason why the Church recruited successfully among the lower classes. The Didache, assumed to be a Christian composition, but most likely based on an Essene original, advocates the holding of goods in common, just as Acts does:

Thou shalt not turn away from him that is in want, but thou shalt share all things with thy brother, and shalt not say that they are thine own, for if ye are partakers in that which is immortal, how much more in things which are mortal.
Didache 4:8

Another work found bound with the Didache in 1875, but also found by Tischendorf as part of the Codex Sinaiticus in 1859, is the Epistle of Barnabas which partly overlaps with the Didache, probably having drawn on it or a common source. Not surprisingly, it expresses similar sentiments:

Thou shalt communicate in all things with thy neighbour. Thou shalt not call things thine own, for if ye are partakers in common of things that are incorruptible, how much more of those which are corruptible.

Here the word “communicate” is one of those Greek words derived from “koinos”. In Didache 2:6, 3:5 and 5:1, we again meet the word “covetouness”, striving for riches, as one of a string of awful crimes that lead to the way of death.

Thou shalt not be covetous, or rapacious, or hypocritical, or malicious, or proud; thou shalt not take up an evil design against thy neighbour.
Didache 2:6

Here we are right back with the founding principles of the Essenes. They considered that they had to practice being perfect even while in the imperfect world. They could not conceive of a just God having the injustices of this world, and saw the kingdom of God as the reward for those who suffered injustice on earth. So, in heaven, all saved people must be equal. All saved people must share what they had. They had become perfect, and had no desire, and no need therefore for riches. But that meant they had to begin practicing this sharing and equality here on earth, otherwise they were not sincere in their faith. The rich who would not, like the rich young man, give up their wealth were not sincere believers and so could not be saved. They worshipped Mammon, not Yehouah.

The Shepherd of Hermas, written in Rome in the second century, though distinct from the style of Clement and Paul, is not as Ebionite in style as the pseudo-Clementine books, though they too were written in Rome and were Ebionite. In the middle of the second century AD, the Christians were getting concerned about how their wealthy members would be saved, and the Shepherd of Hermas addresses this problem. Hermas explains several reasons why riches are a hindrance to salvation but the main one is that it obliges the rich person to follow laws that are not acceptably Christian to keep their wealth. He considered rich Christians “did not depart from God but remained in the faith, although not working the works of faith”. So, the author saw riches as a severe hindrance to salvation, but looked for some way in which they could be confirmed in a second repentance for their desire for wealth. Only 100 years after the start of Christianity, Christians were seeking how to circumvent its most fundamental principle and characteristic, expressed by the Christian God himself, that the rich could no more be saved than that a camel could go through the eye of a needle. For there to be rich Christians at all meant it had already been circumvented, but the aim was to stop them feeling guilty about it. The answer was to be charitable to the poor.

The poor man is rich in intercession and confession, and his intercession has great power with God.
Shepherd of Hermas

By giving alms, the poor would pray for the rich who could then succeed in being saved! So, there was no longer the desire for equality expressed by Paul, nor the actual communism of the post-crucifixion Nazarenes, but the poor were closer to God and worth a few denarii of anybody’s money for an eternal life! The presence of the idea of a “koinonia” continues in early Christian writings through the apologies of Justin Martyr and the pseudo-Clementine works. Increasingly the notion was watered down until Christians now consider an occasional charitable deed is quite sufficient, though even until recently excessively wealthy men have felt, late in life, the need to give a great deal of money to charitable purposes to buy themselves a place in heaven after a lifetime of greedy “striving for possessions”.

Summary

Justo L Gonzales of Columbia Theological Seminary has summed up early Christian ideas on the relation of wealth and belief (Faith and Wealth, 1990). Not one Christian writer in almost the first 400 years of Christianity thought, like modern Christians and their apologists, that wealth was irrelevant or marginal to faith. Faith and wealth were incompatible. Striving after riches, “covetousness”, as it is translated in the English bible, is incompatible with Christian faith.

It was not that the material possessions that constituted wealth were evil—all were God’s own creation and so were “good”—but that desiring them, striving for them and accumulating them were evil human acts:

Greed is not a fault inherent in gold, but in the man who inherently loves gold to the detriment of justice, which ought to be held in imcomparably higher regard than gold.
S Augustine

The Christian God unequivocally declared that the rich could not enter the kingdom of God, but this was ameliorated as more and more rich people entered the gentile Church, but even so, stringent conditions were placed on how these rich converts should use their wealth. God meant material goods to meet human needs, not to demonstrate human greed, and so had to be shared. Failure to do so while the poor suffered and died was theft and even murder when the death was caused by poverty, according to Christian saints like S Basil and S Chrysostom.

The attitude of the early Christians was that wealth should be shared to mutual advantage. The original communality of goods described so explicitly in Acts, became an obligation to all Christians to share their surplus wealth. Rich Christians were encouraged to give generously to the poor. Then the latter would intercede on behalf of their rich benefactors, giving rich camel-sized people the chance of getting through the eye of the needle and into heaven. Christians universally condemned usury throughout this period.

Gentile Christians, who were not necessarily expected to live communally, like the first Christians of Acts, were expected to give to the poor all of their surplus wealth. Augustine said what was superfluous to some is necessary for the poor. They were meant to keep only what was necessary for their own lives and to give away everything superfluous to that purpose. But the dividing line between superfluity and necessity was not defined and when the Church became wealthy and influential in the last two centuries of the Roman empire, wealthy Christians were able to retain as their necessities more and more of their riches while giving such as they chose to give to the already wealthy Church, and not to the poor! Today we can see very rich men flaunting their Christianity quite contrary to the dictums of their own God, and apparently unconcerned about what the eternal consequences might be, even though they can read God’s own words in the Christian Holy Bible.

Catholic Christians, from the Jewish scriptures, understood that everything in the world belonged to God, and argued with the gnostics about this. The myth of the Garden of Eden showed that God had created humanity in a state of equality and plenty, with no one owning any of the original world other than God Himself. God meant human beings to share in what He had provided. Catholics believed private wealth in our world was purely symptomatic of humanity’s fallen state. Adam sinned and God cast him out for it. Private ownership is the visible sign of human sin. By private ownership, some human beings keep produce from others. S Ambrose called it usurpation. He might as well have said, “Property is theft”!

Yet Christians take property as acceptable to God on the grounds that Christ could not have advocated giving to the poor unless his followers had possessions to give. It has already been noted that this view gives no consideration to the audiences Jesus addressed. He was not always speaking exclusively to his own converts, but is often described as addressing a multitude intent on converting some and persuading sympathisers, not ready to commit themselves fully, to support “The Poor”, the Ebionites whose cause he espoused.

Page Tags: Ebionites, Ebionim, Poor Men, Poor Widow, Christ, Christian, Christians, Church, Essenes, God, Jesus, Kingdom, Rich Young Man, Wealth, Mark, Nazarenes

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.