John2 wrote:Sim reminds me in the above that the Nazarenes only used Matthew....
Where does this datum come from? (Using a Hebrew Matthew is not the same thing as using
only a Hebrew Matthew.)
By the way, I am not always thrilled with Epiphanius' reliability, and am going along with this only for the sake of argument; my bank roll would be on Jerome, not on Epiphanius here. For example, the bit in the section about the Ebionites where Epiphanius says that the Ebionites used the gospel of Matthew alone,
just like Cerinthus, is a known misunderstanding of Irenaeus, who writes in
Against Heresies 1.26.2: "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." Epiphanius got the part about the Ebionites right, but brought Cerinthus in for the wrong reason (issues of canon rather than of kuriology).
So if they only knew Hebrew (and that's how it looks to me), then if they did use other NT books they must have been in Hebrew, which I presume, unlike their Matthew, would have been translated from Greek.
I can easily live with a scenario in which their access to the New Testament, in Epiphanius' eyes, is limited by their language skills. Sure. But that is very different than what the Ebionites do, since they openly repudiate Paul.
I reckon the fact that Paul wrote letters was common knowledge. It doesn't necessarily follow that they were canonized by Jewish Christians.
Surely there has to be a reason for Epiphanius' very different ways of describing the Nazoreans and the Ebionites:
[The Ebionites] too accept the Gospel according to Matthew. Like the Cerinthians and Merinthians, they too use it alone.
[The Nazoreans] use not only the New Testament but the Old Testament as well, as the Jews do.
And it surely cannot be a coincidence that Jerome ascribes to the Nazoreans a respect for the apostle Paul. At the very least, even if most of them cannot read the Pauline letters in Greek, it would seem that they do not share the Ebionite distaste for Paul.
All of this has been about the Nazoreans or Nazarenes so far. I brought them up as an analogy, but you are going so far into it that I have to ask: do you think that Hegesippus was one?