EBIONITES (Εβιωναίοι). — This name designated the representatives of Judaizing Christianity or, more particularly, certain specific currents within II. The name derives from the Hebrew 'ebbjōnōm = poor (Gr. πτωχός), and it is probable that the title indicated the practice of poverty among the sect’s adherents. The e. should not be confused with the Christians (πτωχός) of the community of Jerusalem, on behalf of whom St. Paul took up a collection among the communities of Macedonia and Achaia. The great poverty of the «saints» of Jerusalem impelled Paul to collect alms, without there being any trace of a group of Christians bearing this name.
The Judaizing heretics appear under their special name in St. Irenaeus, at the end of the 2nd century. From the outset they divided into two schools, according to whether the Mosaic law was observed by Jewish Christians or was also imposed upon converted pagans. The latter, the more rigorous, immediately became heretical. After being censured by the Council of the Apostles in Jerusalem, it opposed, as Egealppus relates, a certain Tehuti to St. Simon of Jerusalem, and consequently separated from the Church after the death of the apostle St. James (A.D. 63). Nor could the more moderate group long continue in unity with the Christian community, because, although it did not seek to impose its doctrines on everyone, it allowed itself to be corrupted by impure elements. Already in the time of St. Justin, several withdrew from the bosom of the Church, when this writer had not yet despaired of their salvation. After St. Justin they were no longer regarded as members of the community
Christian. The rigorous Jewish Christians held that Christ was a mere man; the moderates acknowledged that he had been born of the Virgin and of the Holy Spirit. St. Epiphanius calls the representatives of the moderate sect Nazarenes. St. Jerome knew this name, but did not distinguish the Nazarenes from the e. The difference in designation is sufficiently imprecise, and the two names are used interchangeably. It is plausible to think that the e. primarily designated the representatives of the extreme Jewish-Christian currents in the Jerusalem community that, from 70 onward, spread through the regions of Judaea and Samaria, east of the Jordan, in Syria and, to the south, in Egypt. St. Jerome attests their existence as late as the end of the 4th century. Their principal seat was Pella in Perea, where the Christian community emigrated from Jerusalem at the beginning of the Jewish war under Vespasian. The sect rejected the letters of St. Paul (whom it regarded as an apostate) and used a Gospel related to the canonical Matthew, identified by some with the Gospel of the Nazarenes and by others with that «according to the Hebrews».
This properly concerns the Gospel in use among the e., mentioned by St. Epiphanius (d. in 403), which «in substance identifies with the Gospel according to the Twelve Apostles, which Origen and others regarded as heretical, and whose infusion subsequently remained alive in the pseudo-Clementine writings. It would perhaps not be a different Gospel, but a Greek Gnostic-Ebionite recension (end of the 2nd century) of the Gospel of the Nazarenes, with falsifications and mutilations of the canonical Matthew.