authority. They quoted from their gospel a saying attributed to Him, "I am He concerning Whom Moses prophesied, saying, A prophet shall the Lord God raise unto you like unto me," etc. (Clem. Hom. iii. c. 53), and this was enough to identify His teaching with that of genuine Mosaism. But by declining to fix the precise moment of the union of the Christ with the man Jesus—a union assigned by Pharisaic Ebionites to the hour of Baptism—they admitted His miraculous origin.
In pursuance of their conception that the devil was the "prince of this world" they were strict ascetics. They abjured flesh-meat, repudiating passages (e.g. Gen. xviii. 8) which contradicted their view; they refused to taste wine, and communicated with unleavened bread and water. Water was to them "in the place of a god"; ablutions and lustrations were imperative and frequent. But they held the married life in honour, and recommended early marriages. To the observance of the Jewish sabbath they added that of the Christian Lord's day. Circumcision was sacred to them from the practice of the patriarchs and of Jesus Christ; and they declined all fellowship with the uncircumcised, but repudiated the sacrifices of the altar and the reverence of the Jew for the Temple. In common with the Ebionites proper, they detested St. Paul, rejected his epistles, and circulated stories discreditable to him. The other Apostles were known to them by their writings, which they regarded as inferior to their own gospel.
The conjecture appears not improbable that as the siege of Jerusalem under Titus gave an impetus to Ebionism proper, so the ruin under Hadrian developed Gnostic Ebionism. Not that Gnosticism began then to affect it for the first time, but that Gnostic ideas hitherto held in solution were precipitated and found a congenial home among men who through contact with oriental systems in Syria were already predisposed to accept them (cf. Mansel, The Gnostic Heresies, lect. viii.). This is further evident from the book of Elchasai and the Clementine literature. These works are the production of the Essene Ebionites; and where they speak of Jesus Christ and His Apostles, His sayings and their lives, they do so, not in the words of the canonical Gospels and Epistles, but with additions or omissions, and a colouring which transforms (e.g.) St. Peter, St. Matthew, and St. James the Just into Essenes, and yet with that Gnostic tendency of thought which makes them lineal descendants of the Judaizers who imperilled the church at Colossae. (See Lightfoot, Colossians, p. 73, etc., and Essenism and Christianity, p. 397, etc.)
The Essene or Gnostic-Ebionites differed from the Pharisaic Ebionites in another respect. By missionary zeal, as well as by literary activity, they sought to obtain converts to their views. In the earlier part of the 3rd cent. the Ebionite Alcibiades of Apamea (Syria) repaired to Rome. He brought with him the book of Elchasai, and "preached unto men a new remission of sins (proclaimed) in the third year of Trajan's reign" (a.d. 101). Hippolytus, who gives an account of the matter (Haer. ix. c. viii. etc., ed. Clark), exposed the decided antinomianism which penetrated the teaching of the mythical teacher and of the pupil, but it is evident that many "became victims of the delusion." The immorality which the book—in imitation of the teaching of Callistus—indirectly encouraged probably attracted some, but would discredit the dogmatic views of the missionary.
Ebionite Christianity did not, however, last very long, neither did it exercise much influence west of Syria while it lasted. In Palestine the discomfiture accorded to "a certain one" (probably Alcibiades) who came to Caesarea c. a.d. 247 maintaining the "ungodly and wicked error of the Elkesaites" (Eus. vi. 38; cf. Redepenning, Origines, ii. p. 72) was in keeping with the reception accorded to less extreme Ebionite views from the time of the reconstitution of the mother-church at Aelia Capitolina. Judaism of every kind gradually passed out of favour. The attitude of the bishops of Palestine in the Paschal controversy of the 2nd cent. was that of men who wished to stand clear of any sympathy with Jewish customs; the language of Justin Martyr and of Hegesippus was the language of the representatives of the Samaritan and the Hebrew Christianity of the day, not of the Ebionite. Outside of Palestine Ebionism had even less chance of survival. From the very first, the instructions and memories of St. Paul and St. John excluded it from Asia Minor; in Antioch the names of Ignatius, Theophilus, and Serapion were vouchers for Catholic doctrine and practice; and the daughter-churches of Gaul and Alexandria naturally preferred doctrine supplied to them by teachers trained in the school of these Apostles. Even in the church of Rome, whatever tendency existed in Apostolic times towards Ebionism, the separation—also in Apostolic times—of the Judaizers was the beginning of the end which no after-amalgamation under Clement could retard. The tone of the Shepherd of Hermas—a work which emanated from the Roman church during the first half of the 2nd cent. (see Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 99, n. 3)—however different from the tone of Clement and St. Paul, is not Ebionite, as a comparison with another so-called Roman and certainly later Ebionite work—the Clementine writings—shews. The end of Ebionism had actually come in the Roman church when in the 2nd cent. Jewish practices—notably as regards the observance of Easter—were unhesitatingly rejected. The creed of the Christian in Rome was the creed which he held from Irenaeus in Gaul and Polycarp in Asia Minor, and not from the Ebionite. When the above-named Alcibiades appeared in Rome (a.d. 219), Hippolytus denounced his teaching (that of Elchasai) as that of "a wolf risen up against many wandering sheep, whom Callistus had scattered abroad": it came upon him as a novelty; it had "risen up," he says, "in our own day" (Haer. ix. cc. 8, 12). This language is a proof of the oblivion which had certainly befallen any previous propagation of Ebionism in Rome.
For 200 years more Ebionism—especially of the Essene form—lingered on. A few Ebionites were left in the time of Theodoret, about the middle of 5th cent.; the rest had returned to strict Judaism and the utter re-
