What's In Your Bible
The Ebionite  Bible

June 4, 2014

Even though we may have ten different translations of the Bible around our home, they all have the same books in them.  We may have a Bible that includes the extra books accepted by Catholics which we call the Apocrypha, but for all the rest, the content--if not the composition of the sentences--is fixed. It has been that way basically since Easter, 367 A.D.,  when Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (Egypt), wrote an Easter letter to his people and set forth the books that are "fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain.  In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness." (1)  As you can tell by the date of his letter, for over three hundred years after Jesus' lifetime there were books other than the ones in our Bibles that Christians in some churches considered as scripture.  Across the Roman world the Bible used by a church was made up of the books that meant the most to that congregation--that is--the Bible was made up of the books they actually read.  In the early days of the church,  the Gospels and the Epistles were copied, carried by Christians from church to church  and treasured by those who received them.   Some churches did not have them all.  Some churches had books that claimed to be written by one of the apostles but may not have been.  And so there was a need to close the "canon," the list of accepted books, so all Christians could have in common the foundation documents of the church.
In those first three centuries of our faith, at least two distinct versions of the Bible, especially the New Testament portion of it, are known to have circulated.  There doubtless were almost as many Bibles as there were tiny Christian communities in the early days, but two efforts to reduce the Bible based on theological grounds stand out.  We know about them because the major Christian writers whom we call the Church Fathers condemn these efforts as heretical.  We have to be careful when all we know about something is conveyed to us by someone who thinks it is terrible!  The chances are that what we are told probably is not  all the truth about the matter and may, in fact, not have painted a very realistic picture in what it does convey.  But in this case all we have comes from the enemies of the groups involved so we must start with what is given and make allowances for prejudice where it seems necessary.

The Background of the Ebionite Bible

Before we get to the Ebionites and their Bible, let's refresh our memories about the first great theological controversy in the Christian faith.  Jesus was a Jew who, along with his brothers, was apparently raised in a devout Jewish home and given the opportunity to immerse himself in the faith of his family.  All of the disciples were Jews.  As far as we know, every one of those who became Christians on Pentecost were Jews--they were in Jerusalem to observe the Jewish festivals of Passover and Pentecost (Shavuot/Weeks).  It was not until Peter shared the Gospel with Cornelius that a Gentile became a Christian.  Subsequently, when Paul and Barnabas took the Gospel to Galatia more Gentiles became Christians.  But Acts 15 tells us that the extension of the Gospel to Gentiles caused a major conflict.  Apparently, some of the Jerusalem Christians followed Paul to Galatia and convinced the new Christians there that they had to keep the Jewish Law fully to be Christians.  They reasoned that the Gospel of Christ started with obedience to God's Law by which Jesus lived.  One could not, they said, start the race halfway down the track!  When Paul heard of this, he wrote an angry letter to the Galatians condemning them for abandoning salvation through faith for the works of the law.  Sometime during this controversy there was a bitter confrontation between Paul and Peter in Antioch when Peter would not eat at the table with Gentile Christians. Paul says, "I withstood him to his face."
This controversy over the "Judaizers" is well known to us, but our understanding of our faith has been shaped largely by Paul and his letters and the Judaizers seem not to be very signiicant.  In the end Paul's position was accepted, but it seems clear that for most of the first two centuries there were Jewish Christians who kept the Law and accepted Jesus as the Messiah. (2)  It is this group of Christians who are known by the term "Ebionites."
 
"...the Ebionites were and understood themselves to be Jewish followers of Jesus. They were not the only group of Jewish-Christians known to have existed at the time, but they were the group that generated some of the greatest opposition. The Ebionite Christians that we are best informed about believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish Scriptures. They also believed that to belong to the people of God, one needed to be Jewish. As a result, they insisted on observing the Sabbath, keeping kosher, and circumcising all males. That sounds very much like the position taken by the opponents of Paul in Galatia. It may be that the Ebionite Christians were their descendants, physical or spiritual. An early source, Irenaeus, also reports that the Ebionites continued to reverence Jerusalem, evidently by praying in its direction during their daily acts of worship.  Their insistence on staying (or becoming) Jewish should not seem especially peculiar from a historical perspective, since Jesus and his disciples were Jewish. But the Ebionites' Jewishness did not endear them to most other Christians, who believed that Jesus allowed them to bypass the requirements of the Law for salvation. The Ebionites, however, maintained that their views were authorized by the original disciples, especially by Peter and Jesus' own brother, James, head of the Jerusalem church after the resurrection." (3)

Granting that there was a more serious division among Christians in the first century than we have been conscious of, what do we know about what was in their Bible?  Did these Jewish Christians read the same Bible that Gentile Christians like us know?  The answer is, "Probably not." Ideally, scripture should shape theology but as we shall see, what a person believes--one's theology--may shape what is considered to be scripture.

The Content of  the  Ebionite Bible

The Old Testament

As we might expect from a church made up of Jews who continued to keep the Law while they worshipped God through Christ, they kept the entire Old Testament.  The Old Testament tells the story of God's choice of the Jewish people through whom he would bless all nations.  The covenant at Sinai and the laws that came with that covenant defined how these Christians obeyed God.  However, since Jesus kept the Law perfectly the Ebionites believed that

"God chose him to be his son and assigned to him a special mission, to sacrifice himself for the sake of others. Jesus then went to the cross, not as a punishment for his own sins but for the sins of the world, a perfect sacrifice in fulfillment of all God's promises to his people, the Jews, in the holy Scriptures. As a sign of his acceptance of Jesus' sacrifice, God then raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him to heaven.  It appears that Ebionite Christians also believed that since Jesus was the perfect, ultimate, final sacrifice for sins, there was no longer any need for the ritual sacrifice of animals. Jewish sacrifices, therefore, were understood to be a temporary and imperfect measure provided by God to atone for sins until the perfect atoning sacrifice should be made... "(4)

Thus, while these Jewish Christians treasured the Old Testament they no longer felt that the laws related to sacrifice applied to them.  We share this belief with these ancient Christians and we also have kept the Old Testament as an essential part of God's revelation of himself to us.

The Gospel of Matthew

Perhaps it should not surprise us to learn that these Jewish Christians leaned heavily on Matthew's Gospel for their understanding of Jesus.  After all, it is Matthew who more than any other Gospel writer went to great lengths to show that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament.  Over and over Matthew explicitly tells us, "This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet...  ."   There may well have been another reason why these Jewish Christians were drawn to Matthew's Gospel or at least to their version of it.  It may have been written not in Greek as our version of Matthew is, but in Aramaic--the language Jesus himself spoke.  There is a very old tradition going back to Papias about 150 A.D. that says "Matthew collected the oracles in the Hebrew language and each one interpreted them as best he could."  While modern scholars do not think our version of Matthew was originally in Hebrew, it seems quite likely that there was a Hebrew/Aramaic Gospel available to the Ebionite communities.  
The Ebionite version of Matthew may not have been exactly like our version of the Gospel.  This is likely the case because the Ebionites did not accept the virgin birth of Jesus and, thus, their Gospel probably did not have the first two chapters of our copy of the Gospel.  While it seems very heretical to modern Christians that these early believers did not believe in the virgin birth, we should remember that the first Gospel written, Mark's Gospel, did not have an account of his birth.  Christians who had only his Gospel would not have known of Jesus' birth.  The last Gospel, John, likewise does not tell of the birth of Jesus. Christians like the Ebionites still believed Jesus was God's son, but they believed that God chose or adopted Jesus as Son. (5)

The Other Gospels

We do not have a copy of the Bible used by the Ebionites, but thanks to Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus in the fourth century, we do have a few quotations from their New Testament.  One of these quotes shows that the Ebionite  New Testament contained some of the other Gospels as well.  The account of Jesus' Baptism goes like this according to the Ebionite Bible:
            When the people were baptized, Jesus also came and was baptized by John.
And as he came up from the water,  the heavens were opened and he saw the
Holy Spirit in the form of a dove that descended and entered into him.
And a voice sounded from Heaven that said:
"You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased. "

And again: " I have this day begotten you".
And immediately a great light shone round about the place.
When John saw this, it is said, he said unto him :
"Who are you, Lord?"

And again a voice from Heaven rang out to him:
"This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased."
And then, it is said, John fell down before him and said:
"I beseech you, Lord, baptize me."
But he prevented him and said:
"Suffer it; for thus it is fitting that everything should be fulfilled." (6)
           Our Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke each record the voice speaking at Jesus' baptism, but they are all slightly different.  The Gospel of the Ebionites records three voices which seem to weave together the versions of Mark, Luke and Matthew in that order.  Interestingly, the Ebionite version includes "a great light" which is not mentioned in any of the Gospels in our Bible.

What Did They Leave Out?

Unfortunately, all we know for sure about what these ancient Jewish Christians had in their Bible is what Epiphanius quotes and what we can piece together from those who condemned the Ebionites, like Irenaeus.   If, however, we go back to that original clash between Paul and the Judaizers and remember that the Ebionites were the spiritual descendants of the Judaizers, (7)  it would not be hard to see what the Ebionites would have left out of their New Testament.  "These people were Jews, or converts to Judaism, who understood that the ancient Jewish traditions revealed God's ongoing interactions with his people and his Law for their lives. Almost as obviously, they did not accept any of the writings of Paul. Indeed, for them, Paul was not just wrong about a few minor points. He was the archenemy, the heretic who had led so many astray by insisting that a person is made right with God apart from keeping the Law and who forbade circumcision, the 'sign of the covenant,' for his followers." (8)

Conclusion

While we might get the impression from our New Testament that there were very few Jewish Christians once the Gospel spread outside Israel, that is certainly not the case.  Everywhere Paul went in the Roman world he began his evangelism in the synagogues.  The earliest converts were either Jews or Gentiles whom Luke calls "God fearers."  The Gentiles Luke describes are those who were already part of the Jewish community because they had accepted the ethical and moral standards of the Jews.  The church in Jerusalem continued to function as a Jewish community and James, the leader of the Jerusalem church and the brother of Jesus, was widely respected as one who kept the Law.  Thus there were many Christians like these Ebionites.  They were either Jews or Gentiles steeped in the Old Testament.  Many of these Christians continued to keep the Law and to observe all the Jewish customs.
They did not start with our Bible and select from it only those passages that spoke to them.  They, like all the early Christian groups, treasured the documents that testified to Christ.  They did not have the benefit of centuries of Christian tradition behind them and they forged their faith on the foundation of Judaism.  As Christians in the second and third centuries looked back at them, they appeared to be heretics--un-orthodox Christians.
The British Old Testament scholar of the last century, H. Wheeler Robinson wrote that
there is a “mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails.”  Thus it is, Robinson wrote, that “The error which one [person] rejects may be another’s present stage of truth.”  He called this "the ministry of error."  (9)  I suspect it is a ministry from which we have all benefitted.  What's in you Bible?

 1 With one minor change.  Athanasius did not include Esther in his official list.  He mentioned it as a book that the Church Fathers recommended to be read in addition to the official books.
 2 Tertullian (160-225 A.D.), a  Christian writing from Carthage in North Africa  says that  "writing to the Galatians, he [Paul] inveighs against those who observe and defend circumcision and the Law. That is Ebion's heresy." Prescriptions 33.
 3 Bart  D. Ehrman,  Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2003) 100.
 4 Ehrman, 101
 5 "For them, Jesus was the Son of God not because of his divine nature or virgin birth but because of his "adoption" by God to be his son. This kind of Christology is, accordingly, sometimes called "adoptionist." To express the matter more fully, the Ebionites believed that Jesus was a real flesh-and-blood human like the rest of us, born as the eldest son of the sexual union of his parents, Joseph and Mary. What set Jesus apart from all other people was that he kept God's law perfectly and so was the most righteous man on earth. As such, God chose him to be his son and. assigned to him a special mission, to sacrifice himself for the sake of others. Jesus then went to the cross,
not as a punishment for hls own sins but for the sins of the world, a perfect sacrifice in fulfillment of all God's promises to his people, the Jews, in the holy Scriptures. As a sign of his acceptance of Jesus' sacrifice, God then raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him to heaven."  Ehrman, 101
   6 Epiphanius, Panarion 30.13.7-8
  7An early source, Irenaeus, says that "the Ebionites continued to reverence Jerusalem, evidently by praying in its direction during their daily acts of worship."  Ehrman, 100.
 8 Ehrman, 101
9  H. Wheeler Robinson, Revelation and Redemption, 33