Ebionites

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The Ebionites were an early Jewish-Christian movement that continued to keep the Mosaic Law while regarding Jesus as the Messiah. Their name comes from the Hebrew ebyonim, “the poor” — a self-description that the church fathers, puzzled by a group with no founder named Ebion, sometimes mistook for the name of a man. Most of what is known about them survives only in the writings of those who set out to refute them.

That fact governs everything that can be said. The Ebionites left no body of literature that has come down intact; they are visible almost entirely through heresiologists — Irenaeus in the late second century, then Origen, Eusebius, and above all Epiphanius in the fourth, whose long account is also the least trustworthy, mixing several distinct groups under one heading. The reports agree on a core. The Ebionites observed the Sabbath and circumcision, looked to Jerusalem, and held that the Law remained binding on followers of Jesus. They honored Jesus as the Messiah and as a righteous man uniquely chosen by God, but denied that he had existed before his birth or was divine by nature; in the common phrase, their Christology was “low.” They are reported to have used a single gospel, a version of Matthew, and to have rejected the apostle Paul outright as an apostate from the Law.

Where they came from is harder to fix. The heresiologists treat them as a late deviation, but several scholars read them instead as heirs of the earliest Jerusalem community around James the brother of Jesus — the wing of the first movement that never separated from Judaism, left stranded as the gentile church grew and redefined orthodoxy around it. On that reading the Ebionites are not a corruption of Christianity but a surviving form of its first, Jewish shape, later recast as heresy by the tradition that prevailed. The evidence does not settle the question, and the line between Ebionites and the related “Nazoraeans” named by the same sources is genuinely unclear.

Their interest for later thought lies less in doctrine than in what their existence marks. Here was a Christianity that took Jesus with full seriousness and yet found no need to make him God — a road the wider church did not take, and afterward could barely remember had been a road at all. The dispute over Christ’s nature that would occupy the great councils had, in this small Law- keeping community, already been answered the other way. By the fifth century the Ebionites had effectively vanished from the record, remembered only in the refutations that are now nearly all that is left of them.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906): General and Gnostic Christianity

→ Related: Gnosis · Logos · Kingdom Of God · Eschatology