Ebionites

Ali Ataie, and he was talking about a, a, a, a Catholic book, I can't remember the name of the book now.

Um, uh, and it, and it said that the closest representatives of the Ebionites, the early Christian followers, the Jewish, uh, Jewish Christian, the early J- Jews that converted to, uh, to the religion of Jesus, I mean, they call it Christianity.

Obviously, it wasn't called Christianity back then.

The, the closest people to those people today are Muslims.

... yeah, so if you're, if you're not Muslim and you're Christian or, or, or any other religion or atheist, uh, we'd be happy to, to have you on.

We haven't had many atheists on recently, have we? We've had mainly, um, uh, people from other religions, but not so many atheists.

But yeah, I'll see if I can get that, dig out that reference, 'cause it was quite fascinating, uh, that Christians themselves in some of their works have said that the closest people to the Ebionites, the, uh, the, the people who, uh, you know, didn't believe in the divinity of Je- of Jesus, uh, actually the closest people to those people today are actually Muslims, uh, which is quite interesting.

There's, there's one thing I would be careful with because, um, we aren't exactly sure what the beliefs of the Ebionites were, okay? So the, there are academic reconstructions of what the Ebionites could have believed, and I agree with Dr.

She, she denies the virgin birth.

That is the ancient heresy of Ebionitism and maybe kind of Adoptionism.

Adoptionism, you know, which is a- another ancient heresy, but it crops up in modernity, this idea that Jesus isn't...

He's not born God.

But I want to go to one more section here.

So the Ebionites, actually let me just do a brief touch on the Ebionites.

They derive from Hebrew, Hebrew word Ebioni, meaning the poor ones, a term adopted by Church Fathers to refer to a Judeo-Christian sect that existed in the early days of Christianity, which viewed Jesus as the Messiah, but denied His divinity, which tells us something about Islam.

They insisted on following Jewish law, which tells us something about Islam, believed only in one of the Jewish Christian Gospels, venerated the righteous James, and did recognize Paul, and did not recognize Paul, whom they considered an apostate.

Yeah, yeah, you're not, you're not talking about the Elchasaites yet, right?

No, not yet.

These, these are the Ebionites.

Oh, there's so, there's so many sects.

Never met on any day but the first day of the week.

There were those that were Ebionites.

They were called heretics even in the early church.

They met on the Sabbath day.

The Presbyterians and Methodists have already got enough to answer for.

And I think that you Baptists ought to take this.

There were a group of people that rose, even in the early church, the Ebionites.

They were called heretics then.

Hear St. Jerome, where he is speaking of Christ healing the withered hand.

In the Gospel used by the Nazarenes and the Ebionites, which I have recently translated out of Hebrew into Greek, and which is considered by many an authentic work of Matthew, the man who had the withered hand is said to have been a mason.

These are the words in which he cried for help.

There was a certain mason who gained his living by use of his hands, who cried out unto him and said, I pray thee, Jesus, that thou wouldest restore me to soundness, that I may not disgracefully beg my bread.

The Nazarenes were Jews who were converted to Christ, who because they kept the law of Moses together with the gospel were cast out of the church.

The Hebrew gospel of St. Matthew, which they kept at first genuine and untampered with, they seemed to have subsequently corrupted by certain additions, in the same way that the Ebionites and Carpocratians did.

You may ask why there are precisely four evangelists and four gospels, neither more nor less.

St. Augustine answers because there are four quarters of the world in which the gospel must be preached.

And he quotes it in places.

And one of the places that he quotes this gospel, he calls it the gospel of the Ebonites because it was thought to have been written by a group of Jewish Christians who were called Ebonites.

And one of the passages he quotes involves the baptism of Jesus, allegedly as found in the Gospel of the Ebionites.

This author is named Epiphanius, writing in the fourth century, in a book against heresies, quotes the gospel of the Ebonites.

And in the gospel of the Ebonites, it's very interesting because it's dealing with an issue at the baptism of Jesus found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

In Mark's gospel, the first gospel, when Jesus is baptized, the voice from heaven says, you are my son in whom I'm well pleased.

matthew has the same verse but there god says this is my son in whom i'm well pleased so in mark it sounds like he's talking to jesus and in matthew sounds like he's talking to the crowd or to john the baptist or to somebody other than jesus but then when you get to the gospel of luke in our in what is probably the original text of luke found in some of our manuscripts the voice says comes from heaven and it says um You are my son, today I have begotten you.

And in the Gospels, it says that he survived by eating locusts and honey.

That whole theology was not present in the earliest groups of Jesus followers.

Those would be called the Ebionites and the Nazarenes.

Now, unfortunately, the texts that these groups used that arguably predate the Gospels in our Bible, we only have fragments of those texts.

The books, the canonical Gospels, the Gospels in our Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, those were written starting in 70 AD.

We have the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Ascent of James.

These texts that the dating is very debated, but they had a certain degree of credibility because they carried the names of Jesus's followers.

So when, when I saw- started to see that big picture, then it allowed me to go deeper into why do the Gospels teach different theology than what the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew teaches, which is the book referenced by the Ebionites.

And one big difference there, you can stop me at any point as I go off on these, these rabbit trails.

I believe so, yes.

A lot of people think there is a group called the Ebonites from around Jesus' time that wrote most of those Dead Sea Scrolls.

So we then have different translations of that, but no one can argue that it was the Roman Catholic Church that was the first impetus from the Dead Sea Scrolls to conveying to the people what they said.

Well, the Dead