EBIONITES (Epimoni) — This name was used to designate the representatives of judicious Christianity, particularly certain specific currents of II. The name derives from the Hebrew *leibhaftn* = poor (Gr. πτωχοι), and it is likely that the title indicated the practice of poverty among the sect’s adherents. The Ebionites should not be confused with the Christian *ptōkhoi* of the Jerusalem community, for whom St. Paul collected alms among the churches of Macedonia and Achaia. The great poverty of the holy *ptōkhoi* of Jerusalem prompted Paul to gather alms, though there is no trace of a group of Christians bearing this name.
The judicious heretics appear under their special name in St. Irenaeus at the end of the 2nd century. They are divided into two principles: one of which, according to legend, is called Jewish-Christian, while the other is imposed even on converted pagans. The former, the more rigorous, immediately becomes heretical. After being condemned by the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem, it opposed, as Hegesippus recounts, a certain Thebuti and Simon of Jerusalem, and thus separated from the Church after the death of the apostle St. James (AD 63). Not even the more moderate party could long maintain unity with the Christian community, for although it did not seek to impose its doctrines on all, it allowed itself to be corrupted by impure elements. Already in the time of St. Justin many left the bosom of the Church, when this writer still did not despair of their salvation. After St. Justin, they were no longer considered members of the Christian community. The rigorous Jewish-Christians claimed that Christ was merely a man; the moderates acknowledged that he was born of the Virgin and the Holy Spirit. St. Epiphanius calls the representatives of the moderate sect *Matareans*. St. Jerome knows this name but does not distinguish the Nazarenes from the Ebionites. The difference in denomination is quite imprecise, and the two names are used interchangeably. It is plausible to think that the Ebionites were primarily designated as the representatives of the extreme Jewish-Christian currents in the Jerusalem community, which dispersed after AD 70 into the regions of Judea and Samaria, east of the Jordan, into Syria, and to the south in Egypt. St. Jerome attests to their existence even at 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 considered an apostate) and used a Gospel finally identified by some with the Gospel of the Nazarenes, by others with that “according to the Hebrews.”
This is properly the Gospel in use among the Ebionites, mentioned by St. Epiphanius (d. 403), which is substantially identical with the Gospel according to the Twelve Apostles, which Origen and others considered heretical, and whose influence later lived on in the Pseudo-Clementine writings. It may not be a different Gospel but rather a Greek, Gnostic-Ebionite recension (late 2nd century) of the Gospel of the Nazarenes, with falsifications and mutilations of the canonical Matthew.