1. Ebionites and Essenes:
All authorities combine in asserting a close connection between the Ebionites and the Essenes. At first sight there are serious points of difference, principally these, the Ebionites enjoined marriage, while the Essenes, if we may believe Philo and Josephus, forbade it. This forbiddal, however, appears to have been true only of the Coenobites of Engedi. Moreover, some of the Judaizers, that is Ebionites, are charged with forbidding to marry (1Ti 4:3). The Essenes in all their varieties seem to have come over to Christianity on the fall of the Jewish state and the retreat of the church to Pella. When they joined the believers in their exile the Parsee elements began a ferment in the church and Ebionism was one of the products. This probably is the meaning of the statement that Ebion began to teach his doctrines at Pella. If we may judge from the statements of Scripture and from the earliest of the noncanonical apocalypses, the Ebionites were not at first heretical in their Christology. Only they maintained the universal obligation of the ceremonial law, holding that believers of Gentiledescent could be received into the church only if they were first circumcised. The keen dialectic of Paul forced them from this position. The abrogation of the Law was closely connected in Paul's reasonings with the Divinity of our Lord; consequently some of them may have felt that they could maintain their views more easily by denying His supreme Divinity and the reality of the incarnation. The phenomena of His life rendered it impossible for anyone to declare Him to be merely man. Hence, the complex notion of a Divine influence--an eon, coming down upon Him. If, however, His birth were miraculous, then the supreme greatness of Moses would be impugned, consequently they were led to deny the virgin birth.
Not till Theodotus appeared was the purely humanitarian view of our Lord's person maintained. All the Hebrew Christians, however, did not pursue the above course. A large section remained at each general stage, and to the end one portion, the Nazareans, maintained their orthodox doctrinal position, and at the same time obeyed the requirements of the Law. The dualism which is found in the Clementines is an endeavor to explain the power of evil in the world and the function of Satan. The Clementines confirm the statement of the Fathers that the Ebionites used only the Gospel of Mark, for there are more quotations from Mt than from all the other books of the New Testament put together: These quotations are, however, all from chapters after the 3rd chapter. There are, it is to be noted, several unmistakable quotations from the Fourth Gospel. In the Clementines as noticed above there is an avoidance of attributing Divinity to our Lord. He is the Teacher, the Prophet; only in the discourse ascribed to Barnabas is He called the Son of God. This, we are aware, is the reverse of the ordinarily received idea of the historic succession of beliefs. It is thought that, beginning with the belief in the purely ordinary nature of our Lord's birth, these Jewish believers gradually added feature after feature until He was regarded as a Divine person, the Divine Logos made flesh by miraculous conception and birth. The abstract possibility of such being the course of events is not denied, but we do say that what evidence we have tends in the direction we have taken. There are elements kindred to Ebionism in the Epistle of James, the prominence given to the poor, the little prominence given to the Divinity of Our Lord or to the doctrines of grace all tend in that direction. Yet there is no developed Ebionism; the Divinity of Christ, if not stated in terms, is implied. Schwegler, followed in more recent times by Dr. Campbell of Dundee, finds a strong Ebionite bias in the Gospel of Luke, in which certainly there is no lessening of our Lord's supreme Divinity. All that it amounts to is a prominence given to the poor. The identification of the poor with the righteous has not come down to us as a tenet of the Ebionites; it has been ascribed to them from their name. As already stated in the Ascension of Isaiah, the Divinity of the Messiah is strongly asserted. The farther down the stream of history we go more and more clearly do the Ebionite features appear, till by the time when Alcibiades, the follower of Elkasai, appeared in Rome, we have something widely removed from the Ebionism of the Clementines, far as that is from the simple position occupied by the Nazareans.
2. Organization of Ebionites:
The Jewish Christians appear to have formed an organization of their own, separate from the church Catholic. The places where they assembled they did not call ekklesiai, "churches," but sunagogai, "synagogues." If we may believe the Clementine Homilies they had evolved a complete episcopal system for themselves. We, however, must not think that every variation of faith had a separate organization for itself. Strict Jewish ceremonial allowed no Jew to eat with any other not a Jew. The "love-feasts" of the early church implied this eating in common. If GentileChristians were present, the Ebionites could not join, hence, the need of a separate church. All Jewish Christians who reverenced the law could meet together and partake of the "love-feast," whatever their belief as to the person of Christ. In short, Ebionism was a thing of individuals, whose opinion ran through the whole gamut of faith, from the Nazareans, who differed from the orthodox simply in remaining Jews, to those whose Judaism alone prevented them from becoming followers of Theodotus of Byzantium, and who therefore sank back into pure Judaism.
V. Evidence from Ebionism for the Doctrine of the Primitive Church.
1. Christology of the Early Church:
In dealing with this branch of our subject we have to consider that the tendency of those who in the early days wrote against heresy was to exaggerate the difference between the heretics and the orthodox. On the other hand we have to consider the psychological difficulty involved in a person recognizing that anyone whom he daily met, whom he saw eating and sleeping like other men, was more than man, was Divine. This difficulty, great to all, was doubly so to the Jew. Yet again we have to consider what the origin of Christian theology was. It was an attempt to give a reasoned and systematic explanation of the phenomenon of Jesus Christ. Christ's character, His deeds and His claims had to be explained. The orthodox explanation which gradually became more definite as time rolled on was that He was the second person of the Trinity become incarnate, and the purpose of this incarnation that He might save many from their sins. This purpose He accomplished by dying on the cross and rising again. The primitive church owed its theology to Paul and John. Repugnant as much of this was to the Jews, yet the Ebionites, earnest, prejudiced Jews as they were, could not affirm in the presence of the facts of His career that Jesus was merely a man. They had to imagine a Divine influence coming down upon Him at His baptism, setting Him apart from all others. We have no trace of this at first: it stands at the end of a process of degradation of the ideal concerning the person of Christ. It was only when the effect of His personality had somewhat faded that men began to doubt His Divinity. The division of the personality seems to emerge at the same time. The earlier Ebionites, like the rest of the 1st-century believers, regarded Christ as one person; only later do they reach the notion of a heavenly eon separate from Jesus. The Ebionites seem to have held under varying forms a doctrine of the Trinity, and their holding it is an evidence that the church at large held it, not of course in that definiteness it assumed later, but essentially.
2. Paulinism of the Early Church:
To some extent the same may be said in regard to the Pauline doctrine of redemption. It is to be observed that both writers, he of the Homilies as well as the writer of the Recognitions, dislike and ignore Paul, even if they do not attempt to pillory him under the image of Simon Magus, as many have thought that they do. What, however, is also to be observed, is that they do not venture to denounce him by name. Paul and his teachings must have been, in the early part of the 2nd century, held in such deep reverence that no one could hope to destroy them by direct assault; the only hope was a flank attack. This reverence for Paul implies the reception of all he taught. All the specially Pauline doctrines of original sin, of redemption through the sacrificial death of Christ, and all the cognate ideas must have been held strongly by the early church or the Ebionites would have denounced Paul in the Clementines by name. Schwegler would argue that Justin Martyr was an Ebionite because he neither mentions nor quotes Paul. To this it may be answered that as the emperors to whom he addressed his apologies were heathens, and Trypho, with whom he had his dialogue, was a Jew, he naturally did not name one whose authority would be valueless to those he was addressing. He is equally silent as to Peter, James and John. If he does not quote Paul there are several indubitable echoes of his phrases and his thoughts.
In the face of the recent discoveries made in Egypt one cannot despair of manuscripts turning up which may throw needed light on this heresy. Were the Gospel according to the Hebrews to be found, or a manuscript of Hegesippus, we should be in a better position to decide a number of questions.
LITERATURE.
Contemporary writers on Ebionites: Irenaeus; Tertullian; Hippolytus; Origen; Eusebius, III, 27; Epiphanius; Jerome; Justin Martyr (Trypho, 47, 48) refers to the Ebionites without naming them.
Ebionite writings: Clementine Homilies; Clementine Recognitions; Clementine Epitomes; Asc Isa; Odes of Solomon.
Modern church historians: Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church; Schrock, Kirchengeschichte; Walch, Historic der Ketzereien, I, 95-124; Baur, Kirchengeschichte, I, 172-74, and Dogmengeschichte, 140-61, and Christliche Gnosis; Schwegler, Nachapostolisches Zeitalter, 17-198; Ritschl, Altkatholische Kirche, 107-271; Matter, Gnosticisme, III, 11-28; Harnack, History of Dogma, 1-89 ff; Reuss, Hist. de la Theologie, I, 115-25; Donaldson, Christian Literature and Doctrine from the Death of the Apostles to the Nicene Council, I, 39 ff; Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 123-26; Helgenfeld, Ketzergeschichte, 421-46, and Clementines.
Articles in theological dictionaries: Smith and Wace; RE, 1st, 2nd and 3rd eds; Jewish Encyclopedia;Holtzman u. Zopffel; Lightfoot, Galatians, Disc. III; Colin Campbell, Studies in Luke.
J. E. H. Thomson