Mr. Jefferson's Bible

June 25, 2014

         In 1985 thirty New Testament scholars formed something called the Jesus Seminar.  The goal of the seminar was to determine which of the sayings, deeds and actions of Jesus which are recorded in our New Testament could be agreed upon as authentically his.  Here is the beginning of the opening paper read at the first meeting of the group.

            We are about to embark on a momentous enterprise. We are going to inquire simply, rigorously after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said. In this process, we will be asking a question that borders the sacred, that even abuts blasphemy, for many in our society. As a consequence, the course we shall follow may prove hazardous. We may well provoke hostility. But we will set out, in spite of the dangers, because we are professionals and because the issue of Jesus is there to be faced, much as Mt. Everest confronts the team of climbers.             We are not embarking on this venture in a corner. We are going to carry out our work in full public view; we will not only honor the freedom of information, we will insist on the public disclosure of our work and, insofar as it lies within our power, we shall see to it that the public is informed of our judgments. We shall do so, not because our wisdom is superior, but because we are committed to public accountability. 

            Our basic plan is simple. We intend to examine every fragment of the traditions attached to the name of Jesus in order to determine what he really said—not his literal words, perhaps, but the substance and style of his utterances. We are in quest of his voice, insofar as it can be distinguished from many other voices also preserved in the tradition. We are prepared to bring to bear everything we know and can learn about the form and content, about the formation and transmission, of aphorisms and parables, dialogues and debates, attributed or attributable to Jesus, in order to carry out our task.[i]

            These scholars decided to make all their debates and decisions public.  One way they did that was to have every member vote publicly for the record on the authenticity of each saying or deed of Jesus.  They used colored beads to indicate their decisions--red for "Authentic" and black for "Non-Authentic;" pink and gray beads allowed for a voter to record his belief that Jesus said something close to the biblical saying if not that exactly.  Those colored beads were soon seized upon by many Christians as almost blasphemous.  In many Christian circles the Seminar was ridiculed as well as condemned.  Many scholars also criticized both the make-up of the Seminar and its methods.  In the end--by the early 2000's--the Seminar had worked its way through the New Testament and concluded that just 16% of the sayings of Jesus recorded in our Gospels were authentically his.  For them, these selected sayings became the Gospel of Jesus!

            Two hundred years before the Jesus Seminar began its work, Thomas Jefferson was our ambassador to France.  He had already distinguished himself as a gifted writer and thinker.  It was he who drafted our Declaration of Independence.  In 1800 he was elected President and he was re-elected in 1804. The campaigns for the presidency opened Mr. Jefferson's life to minute scrutiny.  As always, the attacks on presidential candidates tried to expose any weakness in the candidate and opponents were merciless in their attempts to turn the public away from Mr. Jefferson.[ii]  One area of his life upon which opponents focused most was Jefferson's religion or lack of it.  Many opponents pictured him as an atheist--a charge he vehemently denied.  He was, he said, a deist, that is, he believed that God created the world to exist according to fixed laws and did not intervene in the affairs of earth from outside.  If God did not intervene from outside the universe then, obviously, there is no place within the universe for miracles.  It was this fundamental belief that led him to say that the descriptions of Jesus' healings and nature miracles were the stuff of legend, the accretions added by loving worshippers over the centuries.  He could not accept these accounts as they were recorded in our Gospels or interpreted by the apostle Paul.  But he was convinced that Jesus lived and that he was the greatest moral teacher the world had ever known.  The inability to accept the Gospel accounts of Jesus and the reverence he gave Jesus' teachings made it necessary for him to decide precisely what was and what was not historical.  Almost two hundred years before the Jesus Seminar began its new quest for the historical Jesus, Thomas Jefferson began his own search.  That search was a very private one--the exact opposite of the Jesus Seminar approach.  His search led him to produce two versions of the New Testament for his own use.  It is the second version which is generally called The Jefferson Bible that we will look at in this session.

The Life and Morals Of Jesus of Nazareth

            "The Jefferson Bible"  was actually called by Jefferson "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."  Thomas Jefferson was 77 when he completed his "Bible" in 1820;  he had retired from public life and was back at his beloved Monticello.  He had served his country magnificently.  He was governor of his state of Virginia twice.  He served in the Continental Congress and grew famous for drafting the Declaration of Independence.   He replaced Benjamin Franklin as Ambassador to France.  He lost the election for President in 1796 by three electoral votes and, therefore, served in the runner-up position of Vice President for one term.  And then, of course, he was elected President in 1800 and again in 1804.   Jefferson died in 1826; he was 83 years old.

            His "Bible" is an 84 page document divided into seventeen chapters beginning with the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem and ending with the stone being rolled across the entrance to the tomb.  Jefferson had the volume bound in red leather.  It contained pages made by pasting verses cut from six Bibles  written in four languages:  Greek, Latin, French and English (the King James Version).  He put the Greek and Latin verses on one side and the French and English verses on the other so the reader could immediately compare the translations.  One might assume that Jefferson simply went through the four Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke and John-- and deleted passages he did not like.  One would be wrong.   As we shall see, no Chapter in Jefferson's Bible simply moves ahead through one of our Gospels.  He drew similar passages together and, apparently where he felt justified, he inserted text from one Gospel into another because their content was related.  It appears that he used both an English and a Greek "Harmony of the Gospels" to help him piece together related passages from all four Gospels.

            As we try to get the flavor of what he has done, we need to hear his opinions about religion in general and the Gospels in particular as these can be determined from his letters.[iii]  Then we will look at three of his chapters to see exactly what he changed around and what he left out.  First, let's look at why he felt it necessary to make his own Bible.

Jefferson's Estimate of the Work of the Gospel Writers

            In a letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly, a noted English chemist and Unitarian theologian dated April 9, 1803 Jefferson summarized his thinking about the four Gospels.  Here is what he wrote:

To do him [Jesus] justice it would be necessary to remark the disadvantages his doctrines have to encounter, not having been committed to writing by himself, but by the most unlettered of men, by memory, long after they had heard them from him; when much was forgotten, much misunderstood, and presented in very paradoxical shapes.  Yet such are the fragments remaining as to shew (sic) a master workman and that his system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught; and eminently more perfect than those of any of the antient (sic) philosophers. His character and doctrines have recieved (sic) still greater injury from those who pretend to be his special disciples, and who have disfigured and sophisticated his actions and precepts, from views of personal interest, so as to induce the unthinking part of mankind to throw off the whole in disgust, and to pass sentence as an imposter on the most innocent,  the most benevolent the most eloquent and sublime character that ever has been exhibited to man.[iv]

Clearly Jefferson believed that the Gospel writers misunderstood Jesus and misrepresented him.  Jefferson did not believe that Jesus ever claimed divinity for himself, and he assumed that the miracles attributed to Jesus by the Gospels were expressions of worship but were not historical.  Yet Jefferson affirmed that "fragments" of those Gospels present us with "the most benevolent and sublime" system of morality ever taught.  He thought it his mission to disentangle the historical from the legendary in the Gospels.  In a letter to John Adams in October 12, 1813 Jefferson says it is a simple matter to distinguish between the authentic and unauthentic verses in the Gospels.

I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book and arranging the matter which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. [v]

The reference here is to his first collection of verses which he had entitled "The Philosophy of Jesus," a volume which has been lost.  It contained only the English texts.  Of this book he wrote to Adams in that same letter:

The result is ....46 pages of pure and unsophisticated doctrines, such as were professed and acted on by the unlettered apostles, the Apostolic fathers, and the Christians of the 1st. century.[vi]

The Way He Did It

            Enough talk about Jefferson and what he did.  Let's look at an actual section of his "Bible."  Chapter 7 begins with Matthew, includes a section from Luke and then ends with John.  Jefferson did not leave notes explaining his choices so we are left to see if we can determine his reasoning.  The first section of Matthew 18 which was excluded was verses 5 and 6 which says:

5 Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.  6 If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Why did he delete these two verses?  He did not think that Jesus asked people to
"believe in me;"  to Jefferson this reflected the later church's situation and, thus, was added.  He deleted verse 10, "Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven."  Since it is closely linked to verses 5 and 6 he chose to delete it as well.  Perhaps also he could not accept the picture of children's angels representing them before the heavenly Father, a theology common among Catholics.  Also, although Jefferson accepted the concept of an afterlife, he did not accept the divinity of Jesus and did not keep anything as authentic which Jesus could not have known as a human being.  For this reason, Jefferson also deleted verses 18-20:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. ¹⁹ Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. ²⁰ For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

            At this point, Jefferson added Luke 10:1-12, the sending out of the disciples to preach and heal (except for verse 9 in which Jesus tells the disciples to "cure the sick;"  he did not accept any miraculous cures as authentic.)  It is difficult to understand why Jefferson placed the mission of the seventy disciples here.  There does not seem to be any close connection to what comes before or after in this chapter. 

            After the Lukan passage, Jefferson inserted the seventh chapter of John's Gospel with several passages deleted. He left out John 7:1 not because it contained a miraculous event but because it does not provide any words of Jesus.  It is a note setting the scene in Galilee and indicating that a plot to kill Jesus forced Jesus to leave Judea.  He left out John 7:17-18 which has Jesus claiming openly to have received his teaching from God.  Jefferson did not accept the concept of revelation:

¹⁷ Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own. ¹⁸ Those who speak on their own seek their own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him.

Likewise John 7:27-31 was omitted because in it Jesus says

"But the one who sent me is true, and you do not know him. ²⁹ I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.”

The final omission is a long one.  Jefferson omitted John 7:33-42 for several reasons.  Jesus says that he is "going to him who sent me" implying that he was divine.  Jesus also invites people at the festival he attended to "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me" which again is a claim of divinity.  Some of the verses were not kept because they did not record any direct teaching of Jesus.

Chapter 7 of Jefferson's "Bible" reads remarkably well when one is not aware of the changes he made. 

What Then Shall We Say About Mr. Jefferson's Bible

         Thomas Jefferson professed to be a Christian and did so publicly.  But he admitted that he may have been the only one in his "denomination."  He apparently spent time nearly every day reading and meditating on the words of Christ which he had collected.  Obviously, when one is aware of what is missing, Jefferson's Bible seems to be terribly lacking, taking Jesus completely out of his context, and reducing his teaching to its moral nucleus.  But having said this, one has to wonder what would remain in our Bible if we forced ourselves to set forth our own standards for identifying what Jesus said and then rigorously applied these standards to our existing text.  Most of us don't do this consciously, but by returning to some sections of the New Testament often and never reading others we have produced our own unique Bibles.  We have a lot more in common with Mr. Jefferson's Bible than we might think.  What's in your Bible?

---

[i]Excerpt from opening remarks of Jesus Seminar and Westar Institute founder Robert W. Funk at the launch of the Jesus Seminar in March 1985 in Berkeley, California.  http://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/the-jesus-seminar/

[ii] " Despite the leading role Jefferson played in the campaign to separate church and state in Virginia, his own religious views did not become a major public issue until the time of the bitter party conflict between Federalists and Republicans in  the late 1790s.   After leveling sporadic allegations of infidelity

against Jefferson beginning as early as the election of 1796, Federalist leaders and their clerical supporters in New England and the middle states made this theme the centerpiece of a powerful propaganda offensive that was designed to blacken his character and destroy his electoral support during the presidential campaign of 1800.   .   .  .But most of all the Federalists and their ministerial allies arraigned Jefferson before the bar of public opinion as an unbeliever who was unworthy to serve as chief magistrate of a Christian nation." Dickinson W. Adams, editor, Jefferson's Extracts From The Gospels  (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1983), 10.

[iii] Adams, Jefferson's Extracts From The Gospels  has collected Jefferson's correspondence that relates to his Bible

[iv] Adams, 328

[v] Adams, 352

[vi] Ibid. 

What's In Your Bible?

Marcion and His Bible

June 11, 2014

Christians have had a definitive list of the books that are considered to be sacred scriptures since Bishop Athanasius issued his Easter letter of 367 A.D. and listed the books for his people.  Before that list came out, however, Christians all over the Mediterraean world built their own Bibles by collecting documents that fed them spiritually.  Long before 367 most Christians had agreed that four Gospels, the book of Acts, Paul's letters and the epistles of John, Peter and Jude deserved to be treated as God's word for them.  Many of these Christians, however, added other works to these books because they were inspired by them.  And, in some cases, churches reduced the canon, the list of accepted books, to eliminate passaages that did not fit their understanding of God.  As we have seen in an earlier study, the Jewish Christians known as Ebionites probably did not read Paul's letters because they valued the Jewish Law  and Paul stressed faith as the key to salvation.  These Christians leaned heavily on Martthew's Gospel because it was anchored in the Old Testament which, of course, they treasured.  So if one had asked these Jewish Christians "What's in your Bible?" they would have pointed to the Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew and probably not much else.
On the other hand, there were Gentile Christians who accepted Paul's position that they were not required to keep the whole Law, especially the food laws, and the necessity of circumcision for male Christians.  For these Christians, the Old Testament was important as a testimony to God's role in creation, God's use of Abraham, his intervention on behalf of Israel, and the prophets' visions of a coming Messiah.  They tended to take much of the Old Testament as story rather than as literal commandments.  For these "centrists," their Bible contained the same books as ours and in some cases a few more.
And then there was Marcion who may well be the most influential early Christian of whom we have never heard.  If Jewish Christians kept only those books that linked directly to the Old Testament, Marcion would keep none.  As we shall see, this son of a Bishop developed such a radical theology and a Bible to go along with it that his own father had him ex-communicated from the Church.  Marcion was convinced that Paul was absolutely right about the Law, but he went far beyond Paul in discarding the Old Testament and everything Jewish.

Who Was Marcion?
Nearly everything about Marcion is subject to considerable debate.  All the information we have about him comes from his enemies and, thus, is not likely to be completely accurate and fair.  Fortunately, his enemies considered him so dangerous they wrote voluminously about him. His major opponent is a Christian writer named Tertullian who wrote five volumes refuting Marcion. Everything Marcion himself wrote has been lost except for those passages quoted by his opponents.
He came from the region of Pontus from which Priscella's husband, Aquila, also came and to which Peter addressed his first epistle.  Pontus is the region that borders the Black Sea to the north of  Galatia and Cappadocia and to the east of Bithynia.  Since this is a coastal region it is not surprising that Marcion was associated with ships.  It isn't clear whether he was a ship builder or a ship owner, but in one of those two roles he obviously became very wealthy.  Marcion was born about 100 A.D. in the city of Sinope on the Black Sea.  His father was the Bishop of the church there, so Marcion would have been given the equivalent of an Ivy League education, and he would have grown up in the Christian faith.  By the time he was in his thirties he had developed some beliefs, and perhaps also some moral practices, that  were not acceptable to the church and his father, the Bishop, ex-communicated him.  By the year 139 A.D. he had moved to Rome and made a very large gift of money  to the church there.  Just a few years later, after his theological positions became public, the church gave back his money and excluded him from their congregation as well.  Marcion succeeded in convincing some--perhaps many--of the members of the Roman church to leave with him, and he began the development of what, in effect, was one of the first denominations complete with its own Bible and versions of the Lord's Supper and Baptism.  Marcion became a missionary founding churches all across Asia Minor.  There were many Marcionite churches in existence when Tertullian wrote his five volumes in the 200's AD and the fact that Tertullian wrote from North Africa (Carthage) condeming Marcion's theology means that this form of Christianity was not limited to Asia Minor.

What Did Marcion Believe?

There Were Two Gods
Marcion stood with Paul in his affirmation that salvation was by faith alone and that obedience to the Law was not required.  In fact, it seemed obvious to him that the God who gave the Jews the Law was so different from the God of grace and love shown us by Christ that he could not have been the same God.  So Marcion held that there were two Gods, the God who created the world and gave the Law to the Jews and the God of Jesus whom Paul descibes as a God of grace and love.
Once Marcion arrived at this understanding, everything else naturally fell into place. The God of the Old Testament was the God who created this world and everything in it, as described in Genesis. The God of Jesus, therefore, had never been involved with this world but came into it only when Jesus himself appeared from heaven. The God of the Old Testament was the God who called the Jews to be his people and gave them his Law. The God of Jesus did not consider the Jews to be his people (for him; they were the chosen of the other God), and he was not a God who gave laws.
The God of the Old Testament insisted that people keep his Law and penalized them when they failed. He was not evil, but he was rigorously just. He had laws and inflicted penalties on those who did not keep them. But this necessarily made him a wrathful God, since no one kept all of his laws perfectly. Everyone had to pay the price for their transgressions, and the penalty for transgression was death. The God of the Old Testament was therefore completely justified in exacting his punishments and sentencing all people to death.
The God of Jesus came into this world in order to save people from the vengeful God of the Jews. He was previously unknown to this world and had never had any previous dealings with it. Hence Marcion sometimes referred to him as God the Stranger. Not even the prophecies of the future Messiah come from this God, for these refer not to Jesus but to a coming Messiah of Israel, to be sent by the God of the Jews, the creator of this world and the God of the Old Testament. Jesus carne completely unexpectedly and did what no one could possibly have hoped for: He paid the penalty for other people's sins, to save them from the just wrath of the Old Testament God.

Jesus Was Not Human
For Marcion our material world is evil, created by the evil God of the Old Testament.  Jesus was not evil, therefore he could not really have been part of this evil material world. He was not really flesh and blood--according to Marcion, Jesus came as Paul put it "in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Romans 8:3), but he was not born as a human.  Jesus only "seemed" to be human.  The idea that Christ only "seemed" to be human is one that is familiar to scholars.  It formed an essential element of a widespread movement called Gnosticism.  John's Gospel which explicitly affirms that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (1:14) may be our earliest refutation of the Docetic view of Christ.
Unfortunately, we do not know how Marcion understood that Jesus' death on the cross paid for our salvation if, as he believed, Christ was not material flesh and blood.  Others who held such views developed elaborate theories to explain that the seeming death of Christ on the cross deceived the God of the material world.  It is incredible to us that such a view could have captured the hearts and minds of so many people in the ancient world, but it did.

Marcion's Bible
Marcion produced two written documents that made the case for his theology.  One of these documents was called  the Antitheses.  As the name suggests, this work must have contrasted explicit statements in the Old Testament with Jesus' teachings.  "While the
exact form of the work may resist reconstruction, some of its contents were genuinely antithetical propositions. Thus Tertullian reports Marcion writing, ‘It says in the law, “eye for eye and tooth for tooth”, but the Lord says in his gospel, “if someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.”’   Marcion wrote his book to set forth his case that the God of the Old Testament was so radically different from the God of Jesus that he could not be the same God.  To make his case, Marcion took the Old Testament literally and did not allow for any allegorical interpretation which might have softened the contrast between the Old and New Testaments.
The other written document was his version of the Bible.  Technically, of course, he did not write this document; he produced an edited version of the Bible used by the Church.  What was in his Bible?

No Old Testament
Obviously, since Marcion identified the God of the Old Testament with an evil being who created an evil world, he would not have any of the scripture associated with that God in his Bible.  "These were books written by and about the Old Testament God, the creator of the world and the God of the Jews. They are not sacred texts for those who have been saved from his vengeful grasp by the death of Jesus. The New Testament is completely new and unanticipated."  Marcion threw out the entire Old Testament.  He rejected both the Law and the Prophets.  While we might have thought he would keep the prophecies of the Messiah that were so important to the early church, he did not.  He rejected these because they spoke of a Messiah for the Jews, and this was not Jesus.

Luke's Gospel Edited
Since Paul himself speaks of "his Gospel" (Romans 2:16),  Marcion needed to keep at least one of the Gospels in his Bible.  Apparently the Gospel he chose is that of Luke although there is some debate about this identification.  "It is not clear why Marcion chose Luke as his Gospel, whether it was because its author was allegedly a companion of the apostle Paul, or because it showed the greatest concern for Gentiles in the ministry of Jesus, or, perhaps more plausibly, because it was the Gospel he was raised on in his home church of Sinope."   He could not keep all of Luke because Luke quoted prophecies from the Old Testament about Jesus, so Marcion deleted from Luke all the references that involved the Old Testament.  This led one early writer to say that Marcion
mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord, and setting aside a great deal of the teaching of the Lord, in which the Lord is recorded as most dearly confessing that the Maker of this universe is His Father. He likewise persuaded his disciples that he himself was more worthy of credit than are those apostles who have handed down the Gospel to us, furnishing them not with the Gospel, but merely a fragment of it. (Irenaeus, Ad. Haer. 1.27.2)
Marcion's use of Luke's Gospel may very well be the very first written quotations from that Gospel.  Interestingly enough, Marcion's version of Luke added a sentence to the Lord's Prayer. If the scholarly reconstruction is correct, Marcion began the Lord's Prayer with the petition:
                               "Your Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us."
It may well be that the Lord's Prayer known in Marcion's home church in Pontus used this prayer.  A bishop from a nearby region notes that his people used this petition.

Paul's Letters
Marcion's New Testament consisted of eleven books. Most of these were the letters of his beloved Paul, the one predecessor whom Marcion could trust to understand the radical claims of the gospel. Why, Marcion asked, did Jesus return to earth to convert Paul by means of a vision? Why did he not simply allow his own disciples to proclaim his message faithfully throughout the world? According to Marcion, it was because Jesus' disciples-themselves Jews, followers of the Jewish God, readers of the Jewish Scriptures-never did correctly understand their master. Confused by what Jesus taught them, wrongly thinking that he was the Jewish Messiah, even after his death and resurrection they continued not to understand, interpreting Jesus' words, deeds, and death in light of their understanding of Judaism. Jesus then had to start afresh, and he called Paul to reveal to him "the truth of the gospel." That is why Paul had to confront Jesus' disciple Peter and his earthly brother James, as seen in the letter to the Galatians. Jesus had revealed the truth to Paul, and these others simply never understood.
Paul understood, however, and he alone. Marcion therefore included ten of his letters in his canon of Scripture, all, in fact, of those that eventually came to be found in the New Testament with the exception of the Pastoral epistles: 1and 2 Timothy and Titus. We may never know why these three were not included as well. It may be that they were not as widely circulated by Marcion 's
time and that he himself did not know of them.
Conclusion
Surely Tertullian was right to refute Marcion so vigorously.  Marcion's understanding of God and Christ were tortured versions of the truth.  Having said that, however, we should not overlook the fact that Marcion gave his life to Jesus as he understood him; he was a believer but his understanding was surely very defective.  In the long history of the church, heretics often were martyred for their faith just as the orthodox believers.  They fact that they did not share the church's understanding of God's revelation in Christ should not overshadow their devotion to our Lord.
Marcion's development of an actual list of eleven books which he considered to be sacred scripture  may well have been the push that the church needed to decide for itself which books would be included in the canon, the accepted list of sacred books.  Certainly Marcion caused other Christians to think about what should be in their Bible.  What's in your Bible?

_____________________________________
  1  Marcion gave 200,000 sesterces.  Bart Ehrman writes that "There is at least one way to put this amount in perspective, however: For a member of the Roman upper-class aristocracy to become an "equestrian," which ranked right below a senator, a man needed to demonstrate that he was worth 400,000 sesterces. Marcion gave away half that amount upon entering the Roman church." Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 269.

2  Ehrman, 105

3  The technical term docetism applied to this comes from the Greek word for "seem."   "Two varieties were widely known. In one version as in Marcionism, Christ was so divine he could not have been human, since God lacked a material body, which therefore could not physically suffer. Jesus only appeared to be a flesh-and-blood man, his body was a phantasm. Other groups who were accused of docetism held that Jesus was a man in the flesh, but Christ was a separate entity, who entered Jesus’s body in the form of a dove at his baptism, empowered him to perform miracles, and abandoned him on his death on the cross."  Wickipedia, "Docetism."

4 Tertullian's remark comes from Against Marcion  4.1.1.  The quotation comes from Paul Foster, "Marcion: His Life, Works, Beliefs, and Impact," The Expository Times, 121 (6) 276.

5  Ehrman 107

6  Ehrman, 108

7  Foster, 275

8  Dieter T. Roth, "The Text of the Lord’s Prayer in Marcion’s Gospel," ZNW 103 (2012) 54.

9  " In the spiritual tradition of the Church, the prayer “Thy Kingdom come” has also been understood as an invocation of the Holy Spirit to dwell in God’s people. In his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, St. Gregory of Nyssa says that there was another reading for this petition which said “Thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us.” Thus he says, following the scriptures, that the presence of the Holy Spirit in man is the presence of Christ and the Kingdom of God."  From the Web Site of the Orthodox Church of America. http://oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/prayer-fasting-and-alms-giving/the-lords-prayer.

10  Ehrman, 107

11  Ten of Paul's letters  (without 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) and the Gospel of Luke

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