published in 1864, and obtained great success. His subsequent works of the same kind—Uarda (1877), Homo sum (1878), Die Schwestern (1880), Der Kaiser (1881), of which the scene is laid in Egypt at the time of Hadrian, Serapis (1885), Die Nilbraut (1887), and Kleopatra (1894), were also well received, and did much to make the public familiar with the discoveries of Egyptologists. Ebers also turned his attention to other fields of historical fiction—especially the 16th century (Die Frau Bürgermeisterin, 1882; Die Gred, 1887)—without, however, attaining the success of his Egyptian novels. Apart from their antiquarian and historical interest, Ebers’s books have not a very high literary value. His other writings include a descriptive work on Egypt (Ägypten in Wort und Bild, 2nd ed., 1880), a guide to Egypt (1886) and a life (1885) of his old teacher, the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius. The state of his health led him in 1889 to retire from his chair at Leipzig on a pension. He died at Tutzing in Bavaria, on the 7th of August 1898.
Ebers’s Gesammelte Werke appeared in 25 vols. at Stuttgart (1893–1895). Many of his books have been translated into English. For his life see his Die Geschichte meines Lebens (Stuttgart, 1893); also R. Gosche, G. Ebers, der Forscher und Dichter (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1887).
EBERSWALDE, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Prussia, 28 m. N.E. of Berlin by rail; on the Finow canal. Pop. (1905) 23,876. The town has a Roman Catholic and two Evangelical churches, a school of forestry, a gymnasium, a higher-grade girls’ school and two schools of domestic economy. It possesses a mineral spring, which attracts numerous summer visitors, and has various industries, which include iron-founding and the making of horse-shoe nails, roofing material and bricks. A considerable trade is carried on in grain, wood and coals. In the immediate neighbourhood are one of the chief brass-foundries in Germany and an extensive government paper-mill, in which the paper for the notes of the imperial bank is manufactured.
Eberswalde received its municipal charter in 1257. It was taken and sacked during the Thirty Years’ War. In 1747 Frederick the Great brought a colony of Thuringian cutlers to the town, but this branch of industry has entirely died out. About 4 m. to the north lies the old Cistercian monastery of Chorin, the fine Gothic church of which contains the tombs of several margraves of Brandenburg.
EBERT, FRIEDRICH ADOLF (1791–1834), German bibliographer, was born at Taucha, near Leipzig, on the 9th of July 1791, the son of a Lutheran pastor. At the age of fifteen he was appointed to a subordinate post in the municipal library of Leipzig. He studied theology for a short time at Leipzig, and afterwards philology at Wittenberg, where he graduated doctor in philosophy in 1812. While still a student he had already published, in 1811, a work on public libraries, and in 1812 another work entitled Hierarchiae in religionem ac literas commoda. In 1813 he was attached to the Leipzig University library, and in 1814 was appointed secretary to the Royal library of Dresden. The same year he published F. Taubmanns Leben und Verdienste, and in 1819 Torquato Tasso, a translation from Pierre Louis Ginguené with annotations. The rich resources open to him in the Dresden library enabled him to undertake the work on which his reputation chiefly rests, the Allgemeines bibliographisches Lexikon, the first volume of which appeared in 1821 and the second in 1830. This was the first work of the kind produced in Germany, and the most scientific published anywhere. From 1823 to 1825 Ebert was librarian to the duke of Brunswick at Wolfenbüttel, but returning to Dresden was made, in 1827, chief librarian of the Dresden Royal library. Among his other works are—Die Bildung des Bibliothekars (1820), Geschichte und Beschreibung der königlichen öffentlichen Bibliothek in Dresden (1822), Zur Handschriftenkunde (1825–1827), and Culturperioden des obersächsischen Mittelalters (1825). Ebert was a contributor to various journals and took part in the editing of Ersch and Gruber’s great encyclopaedia. He died at Dresden on the 13th of November 1834, in consequence of a fall from the ladder in his library.
See the article in Ersch und Grubers Encyclopädie, and that in the Allg. deutsche Biog. by his successor in the post of chief librarian in Dresden, Schnorr von Carolsfeld.
EBINGEN, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Württemberg, on the Schmiecha, a left-hand tributary of the Danube, 22 m. S. of Tübingen and 37 m. W. of Ulm by rail. It manufactures velvet and cotton-velvet (“Manchester”) goods, stockings, stays, hats, needles, tools, &c. There are also tanneries. Pop. 9000.
EBIONITES (Heb. אֶבְיוֹנִם, “poor men”), a name given to the ultra-Jewish party in the early Christian church. It is first met with in Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. i. 26. 2), who sheds no light on the origin of the Ebionites, but says that while they admit the world to have been made by the true God (in contrast to the Demiurge of the Gnostics), they held Cerinthian views on the person of Christ, used only the Gospel of Matthew (probably the Gospel according to the Hebrews—so Eusebius), and rejected Paul as an apostate from the Mosaic Law, to the customs and ordinances of which, including circumcision, they steadily adhered. A similar account is given by Hippolytus (Haer. vii. 35), who invents a founder named Ebion. Origen (Contra Celsum, v. 61; In Matt. tom. xvi. 12) divides the Ebionites into two classes according to their acceptance or rejection of the virgin birth of Jesus, but says that all alike reject the Pauline epistles. This is confirmed by Eusebius, who adds that even those who admitted the virgin birth did not accept the pre-existence of Jesus as Logos and Sophia. They kept both the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Lord’s day, and held extreme millenarian ideas in which Jerusalem figured as the centre of the coming Messianic kingdom. Epiphanius with his customary confusion makes two separate sects, Ebionites and Nazarenes. Both names, however, refer to the same people[1] (the Jewish Christians of Syria), the latter going back to the designation of apostolic times (Acts xxiv. 5), and the former being the term usually applied to them in the ecclesiastical literature of the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
The origin of the Nazarenes or Ebionites as a distinct sect is very obscure, but may be dated with much likelihood from the edict of Hadrian which in 135 finally scattered the old church of Jerusalem. While Christians of the type of Aristo of Pella and Hegesippus, on the snapping of the old ties, were gradually assimilated to the great church outside, the more conservative section became more and more isolated and exclusive. “It may have been then that they called themselves the Poor Men, probably as claiming to be the true representatives of those who had been blessed in the Sermon on the Mount, but possibly adding to the name other associations.” Out of touch with the main stream of the church they developed a new kind of pharisaism. Doctrinally they stood not so much for a theology as for a refusal of theology, and, rejecting the practical liberalism of Paul, became the natural heirs of those early Judaizers who had caused the apostle so much annoyance and trouble.
Though there is insufficient justification for dividing the Ebionites into two separate and distinct communities, labelled respectively Ebionites and Nazarenes, we have good evidence, not only that there were grades of Christological thought among them, but that a considerable section, at the end of the 2nd century and the beginning of the 3rd, exchanged their simple Judaistic creed for a strange blend of Essenism and Christianity. These are known as the Helxaites or Elchasaites, for they accepted as a revelation the “book of Elchasai,” and one Alcibiades of Apamea undertook a mission to Rome about 220 to propagate its teaching. It was claimed that Christ, as an angel 96 miles high, accompanied by the Holy Spirit, as a female angel of the same stature, had given the revelation to Elchasai in the 3rd year of Trajan (A.D. 100), but the book was probably quite new in Alcibiades’ time. It taught that Christ was an angel born of human parents, and had appeared both before (e.g. in Adam and Moses) and after this birth in Judea. His coming did not annul the Law, for he was merely a prophet and teacher; Paul was wrong and circumcision still necessary. Baptism must be repeated as a means of purification from sin, and proof against disease; the sinner immerses himself “in the name of the mighty
- ↑ So A. Harnack, Hist. of Dogma, i. 301, and F. J. A. Hort, Judaistic Christianity, p. 199. Th. Zahn and J. B. Lightfoot (“St. Paul and the Three,” in Commentary on Galatians) maintain the distinction.
