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Using Matthew only, and repudiating the apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the law is a key criterion to our definition of Ebionaen.His bit in the section about the Ebionites where he says that the Ebionites used the gospel of Matthew alone, "just like Cerinthus," is also a known misunderstanding of Irenaeus, 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."
viewtopic.php?p=102636&sid=b10ffd8f2f2d ... bd#p102636
We take issue with "coalesce later on in the 1st century giving birth to the narrative as we have it" as the Faulines weren't written until mid 2.c (>144 AD), and I wouldn't argue anything coalesced before Anthanasius (348 AD).what John is saying has been my assumption for a few years, that Paul was opposed by Cerinthus who was an apostle of the Judaisers and likely compiler/redactor of Revelation. The split between these two branches of the church was far greater than Acts admits, and the fact it admits anything shows how great it was, yet these two branches did coalesce later on in the 1st century giving birth to the narrative as we have it
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Or some of the differences he cites aren't important enough to distinguish, like eating meat, or marriage.For one thing, wherever he may have gotten the idea (written or oral sources or conjecture), even if Epiphanius did not say that his Ebionites emerged after 70 CE, I think we could infer this from the data (as per the Clementine writings) that they were vegetarians and opposed sacrifices (including the parts of the Torah that command them) and some of the OT prophets.
While the Dead Sea Scrolls also "oppose" sacrifice and are pre-70 CE, they don't oppose the idea of sacrifice or reject the parts of the Torah that command them or any of the prophets, only sacrifices in an unclean Temple run by unclean people, and they long for the day when sacrifices can be done properly.
Epiphanius' Ebionites, however, totally reject the idea of sacrifice and eating meat (and even have Jesus saying such in their version of Matthew), and to me that smells like a post-70 CE development in response to the destruction of the Temple, and in any event is not in keeping with Jesus' pro-sacrifice position in the NT and Nazarene versions of Matthew.
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Pan. 29.6.7 (on the Nazarenes):So I suspect that earlier writers may have lumped the "no name" Nazarene Jewish Christian faction with the Ebionite faction and didn't appreciate their differences (similar to pagan observers of Gentile Christian factions), but that on the whole their information is correct, i.e., that Jewish Christians (as a whole) held these beliefs.Thus Christ’s holy disciples too called themselves “disciples of Jesus” then, as indeed they were. But when others called them Nazoraeans they did not reject it, being aware of the intent of those who were calling them that. They were calling them Nazoraeans because of Christ, since our Lord Jesus was called “the Nazoraean” himself—as the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles say.
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The Recognitions and Homilies are a mess - I've followed up with a question in our Ebionaen Canon thread.Only what Luomanen calls the Basic Writing (which he notes "can be deduced from parallel passages contained in the Recognitions and Homilies") and a section in the Recognitions (1.27-71) that some suppose (including me but not Luomanen, though he does think it is Jewish Christian) to be from the Ebionite writing that Epiphanius calls the Ascents of James. I think these passages are "real" in the sense that they were really used by Jewish Christians, and while I agree with Epiphanius that the latter is "full of nonsense," it is nevertheless in keeping with his description of it.
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We love the Didache and put in in our canon as community rule.I am also interested to know what you think of the Didache. This text has baffled me a long time, it's very odd and I have trouble putting it in context
viewtopic.php?p=103119#p103119
Or the little "e" ebionites may have been a loud but brief outburst pre-70 AD.And I don't get the impression from Acts (or from the Letter of James, 1 Peter, and 1, 2 and 3 John, which I regard as genuine letters of the "pillars" Paul mentions in Galatians) that Jewish Christian leaders approved of the violence of these Christians or their opposition to Paul, but only that they were "zealous for the law" and believed that Jesus was the Messiah. So at least according to Acts there were already two kinds of Jewish Christians, those who opposed Paul and those who did not and only reproved him regarding Jewish Torah observance, as per Acts 21:21-24:
While we know that Paul's Torah observance wasn't sincere (as per 1 Cor. 9:20), his MO to be "like a Jew .. to win the Jews" and "like one under the law ... to win those under the law" could have given Jewish Christian leaders like James the impression that his observance was sincere like in the above account (at least in the time period it is set).
So in the big picture, we already know (or we are at least told) that there were Jewish Christians who opposed Paul, from Acts to Irenaeus to the Clementine writings, and according to the earliest sources (Acts and Irenaeus), they were also "zealous for the law" and revered the Temple.
And as Ben has noted upthread, while the NT does not use the term "Ebionite" as a title for Jewish Christians, the Hebrew word it is based on is translated in the LXX with the same word the NT uses to describe poor Christians. In other words, while they may not have existed as a full blown branch of Jewish Christianity until after 70 CE, it does appear that there were little "e" ebionites before 70 CE as well as Jewish Christians who were "zealous for the law" and revered the Temple.
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We like the Damascus Document too: any idea where Damascus was?The Damascus Document in particular has always stood out to me with respect to Christian origins since both it and Christian sources mention a singular Messiah and the observance of "the new covenant" and "the Way" in a place called "Damascus." So in the big picture, we can say that there were at least two Jewish groups who were like this before 70 CE.
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Additionally, the group in the Damascus Document opposes someone called the "Scoffer," who similarly taught against Torah observance, and that he and his followers had consequently been "delivered up to the avenging sword of the Covenant," similar to the treatment of Paul by the violent Jewish Christians in Acts:[This is the time] when the Scoffer arose who shed over Israel the waters of lies. He led them astray in a wilderness without way by bringing low the everlasting hills, and by causing them to depart from the paths of righteousness, and by removing the bound with which the forefathers had marked out their inheritance, that he might call down on them the curses of His Covenant and deliver them up to the avenging sword of the Covenant.
viewtopic.php?p=103124#p103124
We find it less than uninteresting: it's an intentional waste of time - don't even look.See what I mean about having to sort through what Stephen says and what Christian and Jewish sources say? And I used to find his hostility equal parts frightening and amusing, but now I just find it uninteresting, and I don't have the time or energy to respond to it anymore.
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I'll follow up on that in the HAramaic thread.
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Some of the pesharim (e.g. Habbukuk) and the Damascus Document are the only things interesting to us;Well, just to clarify, I don't think all "those DSS folk" could be Jewish Christians, only the ones who wrote about the Teacher of Righteousness (who seems very similar to James and Jesus to me, is all), which amounts to some of the pesharim and the Damascus Document.
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I would agree that the "original thing" (i.e., Nazarenes, as represented by Jewish Christian leaders like James) certainly had "more in common with Paul" than pre-70 CE proto-Ebionites (of the sort who opposed Paul in Acts) and post-70 CE Ebionites (as mentioned by patristic writers) in the sense that they did not reject him, though they do appear to have not agreed with him regarding the necessity of Jewish Torah observance.
we'll take issue with "Nazarenes, as represented by Jewish Christian leaders like James" in another post.
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We suppose "the apostles' time" is also post-70 CE, as we define lower-case apostles to include the 70. We assume eating meat and drinking wine can't be used to distinguish any of them. And although we could agree with you that little-e ebionites pre-70 AD could be defined as the anti-Paul little-n nazarenes (in Acts), we'd rather just frame that as a dispute under James with Paul, and note that there is not trace of Paul from 63->144 AD MarcionOrLater. We assume he retired to Spain.Now, I suppose "the apostles' time" could be post-70 CE, considering that John the disciple, Simon bar Clopas and such are said to have lived post-70 CE,
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So I'm thinking if other Jews ate meat and drank wine before 70 CE and then changed their behavior after 70 CE, why couldn't the proto-Ebionites in Acts, particularly given their inclination to take this kind of oath before 70 CE?
And I'm thinking they weren't called Ebionites per se before 70 CE because they weren't called that yet
viewtopic.php?p=103179#p103179
Christ as Messiah is a Zorban concept; the Aramaic word for Christ is the Annointed One, which gives things a different flavour. As for the central focus of Christianity: Jesus speaks of sin only once in the synoptics, and even then in the sense of "all manner of sin will be forgiven thee...". All this washing your sins in the blood of a dead God is pure Marcionism.just said what I think is at the core of Christianity: the belief that a/the Messiah has come or been revealed in some way. Without that, it is not Christianity.
Dealing with lust being very important to Christianity, check. Dealing with lust being the central focus of Christianity? Wow. There is no need even to rebut such an assertion.
viewtopic.php?p=103219&sid=464046ce0980 ... f6#p103219
Interesting.The DSS believe in the resurrection of the dead and the Sadducees did not.
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And the existence of Enoch and Jubilees and the relatively high vnumber of copies of Daniel and Daniel-related writings (which refer to resurrection) among the DSS favors the idea that whoever wrote and collected them were not Sadducees.
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So would you say that post-63 AD, the Nazarenes believed that temple sacrifice was acceptable, and the Ebionites didn't? Could we/should we put that difference in our criteria for telling the 2 groups apart?No, but the did, and they are said to have used all of Matthew.So your Ebionites believed ... that temple sacrifice was acceptable?
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We agree: Nazarenes and Ebionites are indistinguishable unless one of our criteria are explicitly mentioned.Regarding the earlier patristic sources that mention Ebionites and not Nazarenes (which is odd because they are all post-Acts, which mentions Nazarenes and not Ebionites), I'm thinking this could be not only because they lumped both Jewish Christian factions together similar to the way pagan critics lumped Gnostics and orthodox Christians together, but also because they could make fun of the name Ebionite (i.e., "poor" in understanding), unlike Nazarene, since that's what Jesus is called in the NT.
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This is a crucial definition of Christianity.And while Jesus may not have been violent when he was alive, he was certainly disruptive, by rejecting the oral Torah of the Pharisees (e.g., Mk. 7:1-13), which Josephus says was the law of the land, and saying things like in Mk. 8:15 and Mt. 10:34-37:"Be careful,” Jesus warned them. “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod.”Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. ...
viewtopic.php?p=103507&sid=15cddf2365d6 ... 1a#p103507
Interesting - would you say that Jesus was anti-Sadducee?...And Josephus says that the Sadducees deferred to the rulings of the Pharisees (Ant. 18.1.4: "But they are able to do almost nothing of themselves; for when they become magistrates, as they are unwillingly and by force sometimes obliged to be, they addict themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the multitude would not otherwise bear them"), and the DSS adamantly oppose them (like Jesus does).
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Neil Godfrey has an extended quote from Skarsaune, Oskar, and Reidar Hvalvik, eds. 2007. Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries:
It's very useful in clarifying the source of the evidence on the Ebionaens.neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2019 3:03 am What we know—or think we know—about the "sect" of the Ebionites, is
mainly based on four categories of sources: ...
He also has a translation:
Earliest Nazarenes: Evidence of Epiphanius on his site from
https://web.archive.org/web/20180429020 ... -nazarenes
PS: John2: If we've missed anything important, let us know.