What is Ebionism?

1 Denying that Christ was really God. — Ebionism.

2 Denying that Christ was really man. — Gnosticism. Both had their origin in the first century. They are with us still.

An early system of philosophy professedly Christian. One of their theories was that the Lord was an Æon and not really a man. Apparently to refute this the apostle insists on Christ having come 'in flesh.' 1 John 4:2-3; 2 John 7. The same may be alluded to in Col. 2:9, "in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily," in opposition to their mysticism. See GENEALOGIES.

For instance, the disbelief in miracles was put forth be Celsus as far back as the second century, followed by Porphyry in the third, whilst the ancient Ebionites believed in a purely human Christ. Even in the time of Christ, many believed He was no more than a mere prophet, as the millions of Mohammedans do to this day.

Infidelity such as this appeared in the first century and sprang from Jewish sources. It was not infidelity in the sense here used, to insist upon circumcision, and the ceremonial law; but when Cerinthus and his followers maintained that the Lord Jesus was simply the son of Joseph and Mary, that there was nothing divine about Him, or that His divinity was simply the communication of the Holy Ghost at His baptism, then appeared infidelity, fatal and the most horrible to a Christian. It is the reappearing of the old Jewish enmity which met the Lord on all sides when He was here. Though veiled under humanity, He declared himself as God, and the Son of the Father, and that He and the Father are one. The Jew quite understood this, and took up stones to stone Him saying, "thou being a man makest thyself God." The Jew in rejecting the Person of the Son is without excuse. How much greater the guilt of those who, after He had been declared the Son of God in power by resurrection of the dead, still denied His Godhead. The Gentile element however was not entirely absent during this first age. It then began to be taught that the body of Christ was not a real body. And in the second century the church was flooded with heresies arising from Eastern ideas, and containing the same blasphemy.

The miraculous conception is recognised first, outside the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, in the Letter of Ignatius to the Ephesians, and in the recently recovered Apology of Aristides. It begins to be denied by Cerinthus (Irenaeus, i. 26), probably within the lifetime of the Apostle John (cf. above under Gardner). So repugnant must it have been to the severely austere morality of Jews, that "the mere fact that it arose on Jewish soil is a singular attestation of the Evangelic story" (D. Smith, p. 52, after Neander, p. 15). Orr, referring to present-day criticism allied with the system of the Jewish "Ebionites," remarks: "It is a curious irony which makes the narrowest and most retrograde of Jewish-Christian sects (the ancient Nazarenes, or more tolerant party, accepted the belief) the true representatives of Apostolic Christianity" ("The Virgin Birth," p. 164 f.).

110 This principle reappears in the Epistle of James - a true presentation of the state of the Jewish Christians, James himself being in his own person its representative and embodiment. As long as God bore with the system, the Spirit of God could work in it. We learn from profane history that James was killed by the Jews amongst whom he bore the name of "the just"; and Josephus, the Jewish historian, tells us, that for this crime Jerusalem was destroyed. After the destruction of Jerusalem the system disappeared. We can well believe that the true Christians acted upon the testimony given in the Epistle to the Hebrews. However that may be, there remained only one or perhaps two small heretical sects, who held formally to Judaism, and they also soon vanished. They were called the Nazarenes and the Ebionites. But we need not occupy ourselves with these things.

Now the state of the case seems that all the East observed the Sabbath as well as Sunday; at least the observance of it was settled at the time of Athanasius, when there was, as on Sundays, communion (which, generally speaking, was on these days only), with this difference that they always stood praying on Sunday; indeed that from the first century the Ebionites always observed Saturday as well as Sunday, but they observed it as Jews. They commenced in the first century of Christianity, and became a distinct sect in Hadrian's time. The origin of its observance seems uncertain in the East; it was observed as a festival by the church except at Milan. As a fact it was introduced into Spain about A.D. 300 by the council of Illiberis. … Constantine passed a law that Christians should not work of a Sunday, except agriculturists, who were not to neglect the seasons God afforded them. …

Constantine now thought of forming a new sect, or rather, of restoring apostolic Christianity. He renounced and cast away his Manichean books, say his enemies; he abjured Manicheism, and made it a law to his followers not to read any other books whatsoever, but the Gospels and the epistles of the New Testament. This may have given their enemies a pretext for charging them with rejecting the Old Testament and the two Epistles of St. Peter. But it is more than probable that they did not possess these portions of the word of God. It is to be feared however, from their peculiar attachment and devotion to the writings and character of St. Paul, that other scriptures were neglected.

132 The Platonism of John is a fable; it is anti-Platonic in its revelations, and expressly so. The notion even of disputes after the destruction of Jerusalem seems to me unhistorical — save some Nazarenes and Ebionites in Palestine, soon sunk into insignificance. Judaism proper sank into oblivion. The Alexandrian corruption of Christianity issuing in Arianism was later and connected with Neoplatonism. Justin Martyr (A.D. 140) was infected with it, and others of that school in his time. But it was another thing. This is true that the full doctrine of redemption as taught by Paul never took root in the church: the church itself Judaised, and has remained in this state to this day. The return to Paul's teaching, and partially John's, is what is disturbing its slumbers at this day.

If the Gnostics were unsound as to the true Manhood of our Lord, others were unsound as to His Deity. There were many heresies as to the Person of our Lord in the early centuries of the Church’s history—Arianism, Apollinarianism, Ebionitism, Nestorianism, Sabellianism, Docetism, Monophysitism, and many others, like a crop of evil weeds—the human mind exercising itself over the unfathomable mystery of the Person of our Lord. To comment on all these would take up too much room and time, so we will content ourselves with describing Arianism, which above all heresies rent the early Church.