EBIONITES (Ebionaioi). - This name designated the representatives of Judaizing Christianity or, more particularly, some specific current within it. The name derives from the Hebrew 'ebbjōnōm = poor (Greek πτωχός), and it is likely that the title indicated the practice of poverty among the adherents of the sect. The Ebionites are not to be confused with the "poor" (πτωχός) of the community of Jerusalem, on whose behalf St. Paul made the collection among the communities of Macedonia and Achaia. The great poverty of the "saints" of Jerusalem prompts Paul to gather alms, without any trace being discernible 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 very beginning they divided into two schools, according as the Mosaic Law is observed by the Jewish Christians or is imposed also on 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. Simeon of Jerusalem, and therefore separated from the Church after the death of the apostle St. James (A.D. 63). Not even the more moderate party could long maintain unity with the Christian community, because, although it did not seek to impose its doctrines on all, it allowed itself to be tainted by impure elements. Already in the time of St. Justin several departed from the bosom of the Church, when this writer had not yet despaired of their salvation. After St. Justin they were no longer considered members of the Christian community.
The rigorous Jewish Christians held that Christ was a mere man; the moderates acknowledged that he was born of the Virgin and the Holy Spirit. St. Epiphanius calls the representatives of the moderate sect Nazarenes. St. Jerome knows this name, but does not distinguish the Nazarenes from the Ebionites. The difference in denomination is rather imprecise, and the two names are used interchangeably. It is plausible to think that the name Ebionites primarily designated the representatives of the extreme Jewish-Christian currents in the Jerusalemite community, which from A.D. 70 onward scattered through the regions of Judea and Samaria, east of the Jordan, in Syria and, to the south, in Egypt. St. Jerome attests their existence still at the end of the 4th century. Their principal seat was Pella of 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 (regarded by it as an apostate) and used a Gospel akin to the canonical Matthew, identified by some with the Gospel of the Nazarenes, by others with that "according to the Hebrews."
It is properly a question of the Gospel in use among the Ebionites, mentioned by St. Epiphanius (d. 403) and which "he identifies in substance with the Gospel according to the twelve Apostles, which Origen and others considered heretical, and whose influence was later strong in the pseudo-Clementine writings. It would perhaps be a question not of a different Gospel, but of a Greek Gnostic-Ebionite recension (end of the 2nd century) of the Gospel of the Nazarenes, with falsifications and mutilations of the canonical Matthew.
Bibliography3 works
Giuliano Gennaro