Ebionites

Ebionites (Heb. ebion, 'poor'), a term applied probably at the beginning of the Christian church to all Christians, afterwards the general name by which all Jewish Christians who remained outside the Catholic Church were designated after the apostolic age down to the time of Jerome. The name was, doubtless, derived in part from the poverty of the early community at Jerusalem, partly from the close connection between poverty and piety dwelt on in the Psalms and Prophets and by Christ himself. A distinction between the Ebionites and Nazarenes (q.v.), indicated by Justin and Origen, and first clearly made by Jerome, has been carefully drawn out by Bishop Lightfoot in the dissertation on 'St Paul and the Three' in his commentary on Galatians (6th ed. Lond. 1880); but Harnack holds that the Judaizing Christians, though of many shades, were not divided into two distinct parties, and were not originally distinguished from the 'Great Church' by differences of 'doctrine,' but only in the forms of their religious life, while they had the following points of controversy among themselves: (1) Whether the observance of the law was a necessary condition of the reception of the Messianic salvation; (2) whether it was to be insisted on in the case of Christians born in heathenism, before they could recognise them as Christians; (3) whether, and in how far, they ought to hold fellowship with Gentile Christians, who did not keep the law; (4) whether Paul had been an elect servant of God, or an intruder hateful to God; (5) whether Jesus was a son of Joseph, or miraculously conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost. Their Gospel was some form of that known as the Gospel to the Hebrews. On the foundation of earlier Ebionite writings arose the Pseudo-Clementines, which must be used with great caution as evidence of the tendencies and inner history of syncretistic Jewish Christianity, as it is not till the 3d century that acquaintance with them is clearly traceable in the literature of the church. Hippolytus and Origen (in Eusebius) describe a kindred Syrian variety of Jewish Christians, who from their sacred book, supposed to have fallen from heaven, called themselves cl kcsi ('hidden power'), and are hence distinguished as Elkesaïtes. In the time of Epiphanius, who calls them 'Ebionites,' they were in large numbers in the Dead Sea district. To them Jesus was merely a prophet, whose teaching had been completed by a succeeding prophet, and by a new revelation, which seems to have been a confused mixture of Christian, Essene, and heathen elements. Their characteristic tenets reappear in Mohammedanism. See Ritschl's Altkatholische Kirche (1857), and Harnack's Dogmengeschichte (1888).