Loading...You might think – and many people do think – that as Christianity developed, every Christian more or less went along with the “standard” or “orthodox” Christian beliefs that emerged. The term “orthodoxy” literally means “right beliefs” (or correct opinions); the word “heterodoxy” means “other opinions” (that is, other than the right ones!). A term often used alternatively for the latter is “heresy,” which literally means “choice,” used for people who “choose” to believe the wrong things. (!) As you might imagine, these are highly subjective terms A view is “right” (that is, orthodox) for you depending on what you personally believe. That’s because no one chooses to believe something they know is wrong. If they think it’s wrong, they change their view to what is right. But that means that everyone necessarily believes they are right, i.e. orthodox. Or as one wag put it, “orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is your doxy.”
That also means that it’s impossible to say that one group within early Christianity was absolutely right about everything (i.e. “orthodox”) and everyone else was wrong (“heretics”) – unless you assume that people with the theology that you happen to agree with were the ones always right (“orthodox”). Of course lots of people do think that. But that’s a personal, subjective evaluation. Is it possible then to use the terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy” in something more like an objective, descriptive way, to mean something other than views that I agree with and those I don’t?
Yes, scholars do use these terms in descriptive rather than evaluative ways when talking about early Christianity. In this historical usage, “orthodoxy” refers to the side that won the various theological debates (whether they were actually on the side of truth or not); “heresy” refers to all the other sides.
That will be important to bear in mind as I continue my discussion of how Christians came to think of the relationship of Christ (who was for them God) with God the Father(who was also God) (even though there was one God). Heresies thrived in antiquity. Just as they do today.
I will devote several posts to the question of how Christians after the New Testament period understood Christ in “heretical” ways. I have drawn this one from my book How Jesus Became God, edited a bit for our purposes here.
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One of the most interesting features of the early Christian debates over orthodoxy and heresy is the fact that views that were originally considered “right” eventually came to be thought of as “wrong,” views originally deemed orthodox came to be declared heretical. Nowhere is that more clear than in the case of the first heretical view of Christ that we will consider here.
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Do we have any sense as to how extensive Jewish acceptance of Jesus as the messiah was in the first couple of centuries of the common era? For those Jews who did follow Jesus, do we know if they generally held the Ebionites view of Jesus?
We don’t know, but it does not appear there were many (say, thousands) of Jews who became followers. I very much doubt if there were hundreds. Most of them would have thought he was a human who had been the messiah and elevated to heaven after his death.
Didn’t they eventually arrive at the view that Jesus was 100% human and 100% divine?
Yup, by the fourth century.
Great post Bart. Could the Ebionites have had copies of the lost Q Source?
Nothing suggests they did.
in your opinion was the author of Matthew a proto-ebionite?
I guess it depends what you mean. Ebionites would have claimed him as their own. So would the proto-orthodox, and possibly others.
My first profession was quantitative, so I like to put a quantitative spin on theological arguments. For Christology, I think of Delta (can I do Greek letters in this comment box?) J, that is the difference between Jesus and me. If you have low Christology, as the Ebionites, and me, I think of me being a 0 (humility, right?) and Jesus, say a 100 for his greatness as a human. In a sense, we are all sons and daughters and non-binaries of God; and we and God are in some kind of relationship greater than 0 (for those who choose to be).
Other Christians, past and present, may give him 1000, or infinity in terms of is he part of God, has he always been, and so on.
But for all practical purposes, even if my Delta J is just 100 (100-0), as per Ebionite Christology, it give me more than enough to work on in this lifetime! I’m sure Bart will tell us more about how and why some groups of early Christians might have thought a higher Delta J was true, and how those ideas appear to have won out.
Your observation on how we so often know about heterodox views only from reports from their enemies reminds me of just how rare it is that we have most of Celsus’s works, as our only source is Origen’s quoting them before he tries to refute them.
As far as I know, Origen’s quotations are held to be accurate. That suggests to me that either he was so confident he could respond that he felt no need to modify the original, or that the original was still so well known in his day that he must have felt he couldn’t get away with any changes. I suspect the latter, since Origen was writing around 75 years after Celsus. If he had to make such a long and detailed response, that says that Celsus was still posing a major problem for Christians.
Origen and Eusebius both say there are two sects of Ebionites, those who believe Jesus was born of a virgin and those who don’t.
Isn’t belief in the virgin birth associated with a belief in non-adoptionist divine sonship? Isn’t it better to understand the history of these Ebionites as a group that eventually came to reject divine sonship and was in the process of rejecting the virgin birth? rather than as a group than originally accepted the virgin birth but never accepted non-adoptionist divine sonship?
I don’t think there was just one group of Jewish Christians that we can label “the Ebionites.” There were a number of Jewish Christian groups with different views, as Ireanaeus, say, nad Origen probably knew. Eusebius is almost certainly getting his information from these earlier proto-orthodox authors. BUt I don’t think that any of the Jewish Christian groups started out thinking Jesus was born of a virgin and then came to reject that view. THe idea of a virgin birth was almost certainly a later development.
Let’s assume you are right that the very first Christians including the apostles believed Jesus was divine in some sense, if not right after their belief in his resurrection then shortly afterwards. Then either the Ebionites’ christology was lower than the apostles’ (under this hypothesis, one needs to provide an account of how this could have happen; it is easier to envisage exaltation of Jesus increasing over time as stories of his miraculous life amplified), or Hippolytus in the 2nd century misrepresented their christology in claiming they believed Jesus “was a man in a like sense with all.” It is easy to see how the latter scenario came about: most Christians in his day believed Jesus was more than a mortal, and for Hippolytus, belief in Jesus as the eternal Son was crucial in understanding Jesus’ identity and for rest of Hippolytus’ theology. Hence a heretical group that doesn’t share his high christology can be readily derided among his religious circles by a strawman – that the Ebionites didn’t believe Jesus was divine at all. It would be most illuminating if any of the proto-orthodox Christians mentioned the devotional practices of the Ebionites – whether they worshipped Jesus.
So the Ebionites did not believe they could be forgiven of their sins or attain eternal life through belief in Jesus’ sacrificial death? Instead, they believed in following how Jesus behaved and by practicing Jewish Law?
My sense is that most of the Jewish Christian groups believed Jesus was the messiah whose death brought about salvation. But he was a Jewish messiah and following him meant accepting the Jewish religion.
I still find it hard to believe that Jews who believed that being redeemed from their sins by prayer, sacrifice, and repentance would suddenly believe that salvation was to be found in belief–any belief. Or that they would believe that a messiah would bring salvation and eternal life rather than that he would bring release from their enemies, re-establishing the nation Israel, and helping God usher in the Kingdom of God. It seems like Paul was the one who changed the definition of messiah and salvation. Of course, Jewish law gave wide berth to heresy; heretics were usually still considered Jews.
Thanks Bart; that does seem to be the view of Jewish Christians some 150 years after the death of Jesus.
But was that the view of the leadership in the early years after the Jesus movement? From the account of Paul in Galatians 2: 6-10, he understood James, John and Peter to have been wholly approving of his ‘Gospel to the Gentiles’; at a date around 14 years after Paul’s ‘conversion’.
“When James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.”
On Paul’s account, there were at that time ‘false believers’ opposing his teaching to the Gentiles amongst the Jerusalem church; but they were innovators, going against what had been agreed with the leaders of the church; and what had previously been the accepted practice of these leaders.
Of course what Paul was preaching to the Gentiles, was that they should indeed conform to most parts of the Jewish law. But should not become Jews to do so.
THat’s right, I agree. I would say that happened some years later, after the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus. One of the most interesting questions, impossible to answer, I suppose (putting aside Acts) is whether this was Paul’s innovation (that the Gentile converts who came into the church did not have to keep the law); from Gal. 2 it seems like he had to twist some arms, or at least that they were a bit reluctant at first. Later he thoguht they still didn’t get it (hence the confrontation at Antioch)
“In terms of their Christological views, the Ebionites do indeed appear to have subscribed to the perspective of the first Christians. According to Hippolytus, in his lengthy book Refutation of All Heresies, the Ebionites maintained that they could be made right with God, or “justified,” by keeping the Jewish Law, just as Jesus himself was “justified by fulfilling the law.”
That may well have been the view of the Ebionites, 150 years after the death of Jesus; but are you claiming that this Christology was the perspective of the first Christians? Which New Testament text are you reading as asserting that; “Christ was not different “by nature” from everyone else. He was simply a very righteous man.”
Certainly Paul does take issue on many points with ‘those of the circumcision” (Jewish believers on the face of it); but nowhere does he condemn them as proposing a false Christology; as he most certainly would have done had they been teaching that Christ was not God at all.
On the face of it; Paul had no continuing quarrel with James and the Jerusalem church; on the contrary he continually urges his friends to support them.
Perhaps you are misreading Paul in the first place …
Hen answer to your question, I suggest Heb2.11and at least 8 clear formal statements including 4 to 5 by Paul himself that unequivocally assert that Jesus is a man (vs impersonal human nature activated by some deity a la the hypostatic Union)
I still find it utterly flabbergasting to think that the viewpoint that most closely resembled that
of the original Jesus movement ultimately became considered a heresy! If God exists he must have a truly monstrous sense of irony. Rather worth hoping for an afterlife just to see who is more astonished, Jesus or his myriad interpreters!
It appears to have happened a lot throughout history: views that at one time were completely orthodox later came to be condemned as heresies. Another prime example, later, is Origen, the greatest theologian of the first three centuries, who later was declared a hateful heretic.
Professor,
How seriously do you take the traditions that the descendants of Jesus’ relatives, the Desposyni, were leaders of the proto-orthodox Jerusalem Christian community well into the 2nd century CE?
Is it hagiography, perhaps to strengthen the prestige of the proto-orthodox church against other groups such as the so-called Ebionites?
I think those are complete legends.
Tangential question since you mention Jesus’ baptism: I find it odd that in the Synoptics Jesus is baptized by John, but does not baptize or teach about baptism, but in John no mention of Jesus being baptized but it does say that Jesus and his disciples baptized people, and the Nicodemus discussion seems to include baptism. Paul wrote about baptism. Did the early Christians practice baptism because Jesus did teach about it and practice it, or because it was already an established religious ritual, or some other reason? I searched but didn’t find any posts specifically about baptism in the early church.
Matthew 28:19
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”
So Matthew – right at the end – reports an injunction from the risen Jesus to his disciples; that they should baptise all nations in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Yes, but scholars believe that is a Christian addition not going back to Jesus, and doesn’t explain the origin of that teaching.
Which of course is entirely at odds with the formula used throughout the book of Acts – so somewhere we have some bad data.
I suspect machine account is entirely fictitious.
Let’s suppose for a moment that the Ebionites can be traced back even to the leadership of James the brother of Jesus. Is the account in Acts 15 regarding ‘the Judaisers’ a theological attack against the real world Ebionites? It’s interesting to me that that account has James proverbially sitting in a certain position of authority during the debate and discussion.
Yes, it is written to oppose those who support the ongoing validity of the Jewish law, even though the earliest Christians did indeed support it.
The idea that no one chooses heresy overlooks the state’s role in religion back then. When the state is the church, believing something that’s not lawful is heresy. For example, many Americans believe that life begins at conception. For these folks, absent the first amendment which guarantees freedom of religion, the Supreme Court’s ruling that abortion is constitutional would make them heretics.
Wouldn’t this indicate that the first heresy (maybe we’ll call it a proto-heresy) was that of justification – grace taught by Paul vs. the righteousness in the Law of Christ? This one started right there in the 1st century.
I guess it depends what you mean by heresy and what your criteria are for determining it.
“It is unfortunate that we do not have writings from any of these groups that lay out their views in detail.”
We may not have that much; but the key narrative for detecting ‘adoptionist Christology’ – accounts of the baptism of Jesus – we do have; for both the ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews’, and the ‘Gospel of the Ebionites’. So, we can infer their respective Christologies with some confidence.
In the ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews’ (as quoted by Jerome), the baptised Jesus is asserted to be the ‘son’ of the Holy Spirit. For these Jewish Christians, the Holy Spirit is a pre-exisent divine redeemer, who becomes incarnate in the form of Mary, who then gives birth to Jesus. This is clearly not an ‘adoptionist Christology’ at all.
Contrariwise, in the Gospel of the Ebionites (as quoted by Epiphanius), the Holy Spirit not only descends as a dove, but also ‘enters into’ Jesus’s baptism in what appears as an act of adoption. This narrative, however, is clearly harmonised from those of Mark, Matthew and Luke; and so must be considerably later than any of these. Nothing here indicates continuity from early Jewish Christians to later Ebionites.
I’m not sure the Gospel according to the Hebrews was produced by a group of adoptionists. As you probably know, there are various explanations for why it was called that, but none of the reasons proposed suggest they had a particular christology or another. The version in the Ebionites is most interesting for what you say, the harmonizing (especailly when it comes to the voice at the baptism! Terrific. It comes three times). Again, the title is interesting but terribly fraught. I have a discussion of the current state of the scholarshhip on “Jewish-Christian Gospels” in The Apocryphal Gospels: TExts and Translations. Knowing what is what is almost impossible, given the state of our evidence.
Thank you Bart; that is very helpful.
I take your point about the title ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews’ (you might say the same about the letter ‘to the Hebrews’). What sort of ‘Hebrew’ Christians are being addressed; and where?
The ‘Ebionite’ version is more interesting (and fuller); especially the section “And again “today I have begotten you. And immediately a great light shone around the place” These are not found as ‘standard’ synoptic words; but as you have said, one is a variant in Luke in the Codex Bezae’ while the other is in Matthew in the Vetus Latina text. If so; then the notice of the baptism in the Ebionite version could be entirely a conflation of known synoptic texts. Do you agree?
My underlying point being that the simple classification of Christologies into discrete tradition streams; adoptionist/Jewish/earlier, versus incarnational/Greek/later – while attractive and plausible – is not supported in the sources. The texts transmitting ‘exaltation’ Christologies; Romans, Mark, Luke/Acts; are not likely congenial to a supposed separate Jewish Christian tradition. The Ebionite version might support this; I can see no indication of a discrete Ebionite source stream other than Mark/Matthew/Luke
Dr. Ehrman,
You mentioned in this post that (regarding the perceived changed status of Jesus) “The earliest Christians maintained that this happened at his resurrection; eventually some Christians came to believe it happened at his baptism.” Could you provide a little more detail about who and when? Is this first half of the statement attributed to the Ebionites?
1. Resurrection: evidenced on Romans 1:3-4 and speeches in Acts, the earliest views; 2. Baptism: probably suggested by Mark. I talk a bit about this in my book How Jesus Became God if you want a fuller exposition.
Thanks for an amazing post Dr. Ehrman.
My question is, was the Ebionite position ever considered to be a legitimate view by the mainstream christianity? Or was it always considered a heretic viewpoint from the get go according to the mainstream?
At the very beginning of Christianity it *was* the mainstream. But it was soon superseded.