The Gospel ofthe Ebionites.

        Among the various Christian sects that arose in the second century, the most Jewish was the Ebionites, or poor. They seem to have been the successors of those Jewish Christians of Palestine, and especially of Jerusalem, who had not accepted Paul's views and letters but came to hold a modified Gnostic position, like that of Cerinthus who held that Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary and that his messiahship,[15] or the Holy Spirits[16] descended upon him at his baptism and departed from him before his death on the cross. They practiced circumcision but they did not accept the Pentateuch or practice animal sacrifice. We hear of them from Irenaeus in the second century, from Origen and Hippolytus in the third, and from Epiphanius in the fourth, when they had revived some of the ways and views of the old Jewish monastic order of the Essenes.

        Toward the end of the second century the Ebionites produced a gospel embodying their views. It was written in the first person, singular or plural, Matthew being the spokesman in the singular, and the Twelve Apostles speaking in the plural.[17] This led to its being called, especially by Epiphanius, by such a variety of names: “According to Matthew,” “the Gospel of the Hebrews,” “the Gospel of the Twelve,” “the Gospel of the Ebionites.” Only the last two properly designate its title, for the Gospel of the Ebionites was identical with the Gospel of the Twelve (Apostles), whereas the Gospel of the Hebrews was another book entirely.

        The Gospel ofthe Ebionites was naturally strongly influenced at many points by the Four Gospels, which it was. written to combat. It owed most to Luke and Matthew; the Paulinism of John would naturally repel its authors. Its great claim of representing the voices of Matthew and the Twelve was evidently made in opposition to the gentile Christian claim that the Four Gospels were the work “of the apostles and those who followed them,” as Justin put it (Dialogue ciii. 8).

        From the quotations from it preserved in Epiphanius, it is clear that the Gospel of the Ebionites opposed animal sacrifice and advocated vegetarianism. One of these quotations, with which this gospel may have begun, reads:

There was a man named Jesus, who was about thirty years of age, and he chose us. And he came to Capernaum, and went into the house of Simon who was called Peter; and he opened his mouth and said, “As I walked by the lake of Tiberias, I chose John and James, the sons of Zebedee, and Simon and Andrew and Thaddeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot.[18] And you, Matthew, I called as you sat at the tollhouse, and you followed me. I wish you therefore to be twelve apostles for a testimony to Israel!

This gospel described the food of John as wild honey and cakes made with oil and honey.” In this way they made John a vegetarian simply by substituting the Greek word enkris (“oil cake”) for akris (“locust”) (Mark 1:6). It would seem that they not only used the Greek gospels in writing their gospel but actually wrote theirs in Greek, although it may have passed into Aramaic. Epiphanius is our chief informant on this gospel through his quotations from it in his Heresies (xxx. 13-22). These deal with John's preaching, the baptism of Jesus, the choosing of the Twelve, and the last Passover. They show that the Gospel ofthe Ebionites was not the Gospel of the Hebrews, for their accounts of the baptism are very different. It was evidently written to promote the schismatic views of the Ebionite sect.

        Symmachus, the first Christian translator of the Old Testament into Greek, in the days of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161-18o), or (with Epiphanius and the Paschal Chronicle) under Severus (193-211), was an Ebionite; in fact, he made his translation for the Greek-speaking Jewish Christians of that sect. It is probable that these two literary products of Ebionism-the gospel and the Greek version of the Old Testament-were produced in the same region, the same period, and the same tongue. Symmachus left his books to a woman named Juliana, who lived in Caesarea in Cappadocia, and she turned them over to Origen, probably when he took refuge there from Maximin's persecution (A.D. 235-38).[19]

        Origen is the earliest writer to mention the Gospel ofthe Twelve, as he called it (Homily i on Luke), and it was probably written in Greek in Asia Minor, perhaps fifty years before he visited Caesarea, or around 185. Our only other information about it comes from Epiphanius, in Cyprus, a century and a half later. Except for a few fragments preserved by him, the work has disappeared.