The phenomenon generally referred to as “Jewish Christianity” was not a single monolithic entity (in this it is like all other Christian and Jewish sects). The groundbreaking work on the nature of Jewish Christianity, Patristic Evidence for Jewish Christian Sects by A. F. J. Klijn and G. J. Reinink, identifies five distinct Jewish Christian communities which existed in apostolic times: the Ebionites, the Elkesaites, the Nazoreans, the Cerinthians, and the Symmachians. Though there is some diversity in the beliefs of these groups, New Testament scholar James Dunn has identified three common characteristics that warrant giving the umbrella label of “Jewish Christian” to them all:
1) Faithful adherence to the Law of Moses.
2) The exaltation of James, and the denigration of Paul.
3) A christology of “adoptionism” — they all believed that Jesus was the natural born son of Joseph and Mary and “adopted” by God as his Son upon his baptism by John.
There has been much debate and much confusion among scholars as to the exact nature of these various groups and their relation to each other. To help simplify what is a notoriously knotty problem, it is important to keep in mind that the first Christians were called “Nazarenes.” Under James’s leadership, the original followers of Jesus were not called Christians. This is a name bestowed upon them only decades later in the Gentile church at Antioch, as recorded in a famous passage in Acts: “. . . it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called ‘Christians’” [Acts 11:26]. Prior to this, according to the New Testament itself, Jesus’ original Jewish followers were known as “Nazarenes.” The word “Christian” is only used three times in the New Testament, and these references are from quite late in the first century (Acts 26:28, 1 Peter 4:13 and 4:16). In comparison, the term “Nazarene” or “Nazorean” is used fourteen times in the gospels and Acts (Matthew 2:23, 26:71, Luke 18:37, 24:19, John 18:5, 18:7, 19:19, Acts 2:22, 3:6, 4:10, 6:14, 22:8, 24:5, 26:9).
It is quite likely that the designation “Jesus of Nazareth” was originally “Jesus the Nazrene,” a name describing the messianic “Jesus party,” which was just one of many religious parties within Judaism at the time, the dominant groups being the Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots. While a number of scholars use the term “Nazorean” or “Nasorean,” as it comports more closely to the original Greek, I prefer the more commonly used “Nazarene,” not only because it is found most often in English Bibles, but because it serves to distinguish the first Christians from a later Jewish Christian sect called the Nazoreans.
The Ebionites claimed that they were the direct descendants of the Nazarenes. Most Christian scholarship has dismissed this claim. But there is a fascinating testimony recorded in Eusebius and Epiphanius of the escape of the Nazarenes from Jerusalem prior to the Roman invasion in 70 A.D. thanks to the warning of a prophecy, whence they fled to Pella in Transjordan. Following the devastation of the Jewish War, the Nazarenes hunkered down in Pella, a community in exile, lying in anxious wait with their fellow Jews. From this point on, I feel it is preferable to call them the Ebionites. There is no clear demarcation to mark any kind of formal transition from Nazarene to Ebionite; there was no sudden change of theology or Christology. But the great divide that is marked for all the Jewish people before and after the critical year of 70 is as good a marker as any to demarcate the transition from Nazarene to Ebionite, especially since many scholars refer to the difference between pre-70 and post-70 Judaism as Hebrew (or Israelite) religion and Rabbinical Judaism. Another reason that this time period could be said to mark a transition from the Nazarenes to the Ebionites is because it is just before this time that there is a transition of leadership from James to Jesus’ “cousin” Symeon, who was elected the second Bishop of Jerusalem after the death of James. While the writings of the later Church Fathers speak of the Nazarenes and Ebionites as if they were two different Jewish Christian groups, they are mistaken in that assessment. The Nazarenes and the Ebionites were one and the same group; but for clarity I prefer to refer to the pre-70 group in Jerusalem as Nazarenes, and the post-70 group as Ebionites.
We first encounter the term “Ebionite” in the writings of the Church Father, Irenaeus, who was one of the first heresy hunters of the emerging Catholic Church. Late in the second century he wrote the mammoth five-volume Refutation of All Heresies. Irenaeus sums up the distinctive beliefs and practices of the heretical Ebionites thus:
"They use the gospel according to Matthew only, and repudiate the apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the Law. . . . they practice circumcision, persevere in 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. " [Refutation of All Heresies, 1.26.2]
Sound familiar? We can see from Irenaeus’s description that the Ebionites plainly fit James Dunn’s criteria of “Jewish Christian.” It is quite certain that all of the later Jewish Christian groups ultimately derived from the Nazarenes in Jerusalem. The Nazarenes and the Ebionites are in fact one and the same group.
“Ebionite” was a term that the Nazarenes in Jerusalem took as their own self-appellation. It is derived from the Hebrew word evyonim, which literally means “the poor.” The term may be a technical one, not necessarily indicating peasants living in poverty (though their conditions were indeed relatively poor), but rather a self-designation of pride on the part of the Nazarenes, who called themselves “the Poor” because of their chosen ascetic way of life and renunciation of personal possessions (see Acts 2:44-45). Later Christians, such as the Church Father Origen, retorted that it was most fitting for the Jewish Christians to call themselves “the Poor,” since they had such a “poor” understanding of the divinity of Jesus. The choosing of this name may have been inspired by Jesus himself, who said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor . . . for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” [Matt. 5:3]. Jesus’ brother certainly carried on this teaching. In the Epistle of James we read: “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” [James 2:5]. It is also interesting that Paul uses the term in association with the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem (Romans 15:26, Galatians 2:10).
As a result of the audacious and doomed Jewish rebellion against Rome, the many new Gentile churches that were springing up as a result of Paul’s missionary efforts presented a cold and aloof face to the heirs of Jesus’ family and the Jerusalem Church. For Paul’s Gentile Christians, the destruction of Jerusalem seemed to confirm Paul’s teaching that the Torah was a relic of the past; in fact, a cursed thing rejected by God now that the New Covenant had been revealed through the death and resurrection of Jesus. As Paul bluntly put it, “For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse . . .” [Galatians 3:10]. The new Christians certainly could not find any sympathy for the nationalistic aspirations of the Ebionites. It seemed to the Christians that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was God’s judgment on the people of Israel for not accepting Jesus as their Messiah. For the Ebionites, as for all Jews, the end of the Temple meant the cessation of temple rites and the end of animal sacrifice. For the Gentile Christians, this all seemed to be the death knell of the Law, and Jesus’ death on a Roman cross was increasingly understood by them as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.
The parting of the ways between Ebionites and Christians was fully cemented after the second Jewish revolt under the messianic pretender Bar Kokhba in the year 135. After this second failed rebellion, the separation would be complete and permanent. For the Christians, it was a welcome release from the need to adhere to any lingering vestiges of Jewish teachings and practices. They were now free to develop a theology, Christology, and liturgy all their own, inspired and informed by their Hellenistic interpretation of Paul’s epistles, a process that would eventually culminate in the dogmas set down at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and refined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Dr. Hugh Schonfield, in his seminal work The History of Jewish Christianity (1936), insightfully and even-handedly summed up the situation this way:
"Thus by the pressure of political circumstances and racial antipathies Jewish and Gentile Christianity drew apart, each following the path of its inherited tendencies, and developing its beliefs along the lines of its own racial genius. Paul’s great ideal of Jew and Gentile both one in Christ could not then be realized, because neither would acknowledge the right of the other to regard God’s revelation from the standpoint of his own psychology." [p. 56]
To his dying day, Schonfield (1901-1988), who was a true humanist, held out hope that Paul’s “great ideal” for the unity of Jew and Gentile might one day be realized through a new appreciation of original Jewish Christianity. We still wait. But, in our own day there are heartening signs of such a potential reconciliation as original Jewish Christianity is being rediscovered and reassessed by both Jewish and Christian scholars. Thanks to the seminal works of Hugh Schonfield and Hyam Maccoby, and recent works by Robert Eisenman, James Tabor and Barrie Wilson, these findings are finally beginning to trickle down to the layperson.
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