Scholarly consensus

The Ebionites were Jewish followers of Jesus who kept the law of Moses, held him to be a man and a prophet, and rejected Paul of Tarsus. They are known from the writings of the church fathers who opposed them, from the second century to the fifth, and from fragments of a gospel they used. No book of theirs survives whole. Their name is from the Hebrew ebyonim, “the poor”, which was also what the Jerusalem community called itself (Galatians 2:10; Romans 15:26).

Model of Jerusalem and the Temple of Herod in the first century, Israel Museum — The Temple of Herod in the model of first-century Jerusalem at the Israel Museum. The Ebionites kept the law of the Temple’s city after its fall. Photograph by Berthold Werner. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

What the fathers report

Irenaeus, writing around 180 CE, gives the earliest account: “Those who are called Ebionites agree that the world was made by God; but their opinions with respect to the Lord are similar to those of Cerinthus and Carpocrates. They use the Gospel according to Matthew only, and repudiate the Apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the law. As to the prophetical writings, they endeavour to expound them in a somewhat singular manner; they practise circumcision, persevere in the observance of those customs which are enjoined by the law, and are so Judaic in their style of life that they even adore Jerusalem as if it were the house of God” (Against Heresies 1.26.2). Origen, in the third century, says the name means “poor” and that they are poor in understanding, and distinguishes two kinds, one accepting the virgin birth and one not (Against Celsus 5.61). Eusebius says they held Jesus to be “a plain and common man, who was justified only because of his superior virtue, and who was the fruit of the intercourse of a man with Mary”, that they kept the sabbath and the whole law, and that they rejected all the letters of Paul of Tarsus, “whom they called an apostate from the law” (Ecclesiastical History 3.27). Epiphanius, around 375 CE, devotes a long and hostile chapter to them (Panarion 30) and quotes from their gospel.

The Gospel of the Ebionites

Epiphanius preserves seven fragments of a gospel the Ebionites used, which he says was a mutilated Matthew. The fragments show a harmony of the synoptic gospels in Greek, beginning with the baptism rather than the birth, in which John the Baptist eats honey cakes rather than locusts (the group was vegetarian), and in which Jesus says, “I have come to abolish the sacrifices, and if you do not cease from sacrificing, the wrath will not cease from you.” Whatever else it was, it was a gospel without a virgin birth, without Paul of Tarsus, and with a Jesus who kept the law and opposed the Temple cult.

What is uncertain

Every source is hostile, and the earliest is a century and a half after the crucifixion. Scholars debate whether the Ebionites descend directly from the Jerusalem church of James, dispersed after the war of 66 to 73 CE, or whether they arose later among Jewish Christians east of the Jordan. The fathers themselves disagree about details, Origen’s two kinds of Ebionite being the clearest example, and some of what Epiphanius reports may belong to other groups. What is not in doubt is that from the second century onwards there were communities of Jewish followers of Jesus who kept the law, held Jesus to be a prophet and not God, and named Paul of Tarsus as the man who had betrayed the law, and that the Great Church counted them heretics.

The Pseudo-Clementines

A body of writings from the third and fourth centuries, the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, preserves Jewish-Christian traditions in which Peter is the true apostle and his unnamed “enemy” preaches a lawless gospel on the strength of a vision. In the Homilies Peter tells him that one who has seen a vision cannot be sure it was not a demon, and that the truth was taught to the apostles who heard Jesus in person (Homilies 17.13-19). Most scholars take the enemy to be Paul of Tarsus. The Letter of Peter to James, prefixed to the Homilies, warns that some gentiles have rejected Peter’s lawful preaching “in favour of the lawless and absurd doctrine of the man who is my enemy”. These texts are late and layered, but they show the argument of Galatians 2 still being fought, from the other side, two centuries on.

Why it matters here

The existence of the Ebionites shows that Paul of Tarsus’s gospel was contested from the beginning by Jewish followers of Jesus who claimed to be keeping what he taught, and that the side which lost the argument lost its books as well. The Ebionite Jesus, a man and a prophet, born of Joseph and Mary according to some of them, who kept the law and called others to it, is nearer in every respect but one to the ʿĪsā of the Qur’an than is the Christ of the creeds; the Qur’an differs from them on the virgin birth, which it affirms (3:47; 19:20-21). The resemblance was noticed by the church fathers, who called Islam a revival of the Ebionite heresy, and it has been noticed by modern scholars from Adolf von Harnack onwards. This website does not claim descent; it claims that the earliest Jewish witnesses to Jesus and the Qur’an agree on what he was, and that Paul of Tarsus is the point at which the gentile church departed from both. See James and the Jerusalem church and the false apostles.

Sources

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.26.2; Origen, Against Celsus 5.61; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.27; Epiphanius, Panarion 30.
Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (eds.), Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries.
Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities, chapter on the Ebionites, and Lost Scriptures, for the gospel fragments.
F. Stanley Jones, Pseudoclementina Elchasaiticaque inter Judaeochristiana, on the Pseudo-Clementines.