Cults & Minor Religions

by Robert M. Bowman, Jr. –

The Ebionites and the Gnostics were two very different examples of the religious phenomenon that New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman has called “lost Christianities.”¹ A conventional view of these movements is that the Ebionites represented an extreme form of “Jewish” Christianity while the Gnostics represented an equally extreme form of “Gentile” Christianity. Contemporary scholarship has cast serious doubt on such characterizations. Karen King lampoons what she calls “the three Bears story of Christian origins” in which Jewish Christianity is too Jewish, Gnosticism is not Jewish enough, and “orthodoxy is just right,” retaining only what was good and true in Judaism.² Indeed, scholars vigorously debate almost everything about these subjects, including such basic questions as whether it is even appropriate to speak of “Jewish Christians” or of “Gnosticism.” The entire field of study is in a state of flux, if not of disarray, so much so that practically any statement one makes about these things is controversial. The reader has been warned!

Who Were the Ebionites?—

Before we even begin to discuss the identity of the Ebionites, we should say something about our sources of information about them. We have no texts from anyone claiming to represent the Ebionites by name. The earliest possible reference to them, though not by name, is in Justin Martyr’s book Dialogue with Trypho the Jew (ca. 160). The term “Ebionites” appears in the writings of several of the church fathers, specifically Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Eusebius, and Epiphanius.³ Epiphanius’s book Panarion (“Medicine Chest”) includes several quotations from a book he says was a Gospel used by the Ebionites, as well as references to other writings that he associated with them.⁴ Many, though not all, modern scholars think that these writings likely included at least some of the Pseudo-Clementine literature, particularly the majority of the material in Clementine Recognitions 1.27-71. Recent studies remain divided or at least cautious on the issue.⁵

Our knowledge of the Ebionites, then, is entirely secondhand and dependent on sources that regarded the Ebionites as heretics, with the possible but disputable exception of Recognitions 1.27-71. This doesn’t mean we can know nothing about them, but it does mean that we should be cautious about accepting at face value everything the church fathers said about the Ebionites. Some contemporary scholars are scornful and even contemptuous of the “heresiologists”—men such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius who wrote books critiquing heretical forms of Christianity—but the fact of their theological agenda does not negate the value of their work (any more than does the agenda of the scholars who criticize them).

As mentioned above, Justin Martyr is probably our earliest source of information about the Ebionites, although he does not mention them by name. Justin says that there were some Jews (“of our race”) who acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ (Messiah) but denied that he was God, viewing him instead as “man of men.” The expression “man of men” almost certainly means that this group of Jewish Christians denied the virgin birth—that is, they held that Jesus was a human being sired by a human father. This group also believed Jesus “to have been anointed by election, and then to have become Christ.”⁶ This description, though brief, matches Irenaeus’s more extensive and specific description just two decades later. According to Irenaeus in his work Against Heresies, the Ebionites denied that Jesus was God and denied his virgin birth, regarding him as the offspring of Joseph.⁷ Irenaeus also reports that the Ebionites regarded Paul as an apostate, not as a true apostle, and that they practiced circumcision and other requirements of the Law (i.e., the Torah).⁸ These descriptive elements show up consistently in later accounts of the Ebionites, and scholars generally accept these elements as accurate.

The Ebionites, then, were a Christian sect that affirmed that Jesus was the Messiah. Evidently, they accepted Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection but denied that Jesus was God incarnate. In their teaching, he was simply a man, Joseph’s biological son, who lived a righteous life according to the Torah and expected his followers to try to do likewise. It appears that the Ebionites held to an adoptionist Christology, according to which Jesus was a mere man who by his faithfulness to God was “adopted” as the Messianic Son of God. The Ebionites identified the moment of this adoption as the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. However, later descriptions suggest a more complex Christology in which a preexistent yet created Christ spirit superior to the angels came on and entered into the man Jesus at his baptism.⁹ It is difficult to be sure if these later descriptions of Ebionite Christology were confusing them with other groups or if their Christology had changed. If the latter is what happened, then their later Christology may have combined elements of Arian and adoptionist Christologies.

The Ebionites are often described as a group of “Jewish Christians,” and one can see why, given their insistence on observance of the Torah. Justin’s description of a
group of believers in Jesus from the Jewish “race” matching the Ebionites supports that conclusion. However, it does not follow that all of the Ebionites were Jewish by ethnicity. They may have included Gentile converts who agreed to accept the Torah and the Ebionites’ specific views about Jesus as part of their faith. Still, it seems likely that the Ebionites remained predominantly people of Jewish ethnic and cultural heritage.

Our most detailed information about the Ebionites comes from Epiphanius’s Panarion, a fourth-century textbook on heresies that provided information on the origins and beliefs of various heresies followed in each case by a theological critique based primarily on Scripture. Epiphanius’s attitude toward the Ebionites is quite inflammatory, but he does provide the closest thing we have to primary-source material for them, namely, his quotations from their “Gospel.” The Ebionites apparently claimed that their Gospel originated from Matthew, but the evidence of Epiphanius’s quotations makes it clear that their Gospel left out sizable portions of the canonical Gospel of Matthew (notably the infancy narrative in Matthew 1-2) and included material taken from other Gospels, especially from Luke. Their Gospel also added some interesting new twists to familiar passages. For example, in their version John the Baptist’s food did not include locusts; instead, his “meat was wild honey, whose taste was the taste of manna, as a cake in oil.”¹⁰ Here the Ebionites’ Gospel used the Greek word egkris (“cake”) instead of akris (“locust”), two words that sounded very much alike, suggesting that their Gospel was originally written in Greek.¹¹ The reason for this particular change was that the Ebionites were vegetarians.

So far we have said nothing about the meaning of the term Ebionites. Irenaeus does not comment on the matter,¹² but later church fathers beginning with Tertullian explained that the sect was started by a man named Ebion.¹³ Epiphanius reported that Ebion had been born in the village of Cochabe in Bashan and had preached in Asia (modern-day Turkey) and to Rome.¹⁴ Despite this specificity of information about Ebion, modern scholars almost uniformly deny that he existed. Both Origen¹⁵ and Epiphanius accepted the historical existence of Ebion while also recognizing that the Ebionites themselves derived their name from a word meaning “poor.”¹⁶ Scholars agree that this is the correct derivation (though not Origen’s suggestion, followed by Epiphanius, that their problem was a “poverty of understanding” of the Christian faith¹⁷).

The Ebionites evidently referred to themselves as “the poor” (Hebrew ’ebyônîm, Aramaic ’ebyônaye), a self-designation that would have meant that they viewed themselves
as the faithful and needy saints whom God would bless in the age to come. Various statements in the Old Testament expressed such hope for the poor (e.g., Ps. 9:18; 72:12-13),18 but the Ebionites were probably especially inspired by Jesus’ first beatitude, “Blessed are you poor” (Luke 6:20; cf. Matt. 5:3).¹⁹ However, there is no reference in the New Testament to a specific group or sect of Jewish Christians as “the poor.” In the Epistle of James, a natural place to look for such references, the term “poor” refers not to the church as a whole but to poor believers in comparison to more affluent believers in the same congregation (James 2:2-6).²⁰ Paul wrote of his eagerness to “remember the poor” (Gal. 2:10), referring to saints in Jerusalem, but Paul’s reference elsewhere to “the poor among the saints at Jerusalem” (Rom. 15:26) makes it clear that “the poor” is not for Paul a designation for the whole Jerusalem church.

The fact that one particular group of Jewish Christians, or more precisely one group of Torah-observant Christians, became known as the Ebionites raises an obvious and controversial question. What was the relationship of these Ebionites to the original Jewish believers in Jesus? One theory is that the Ebionites were essentially the “original Christians,” representing the earliest stream of Christian faith that was self-consciously Jewish and whose views were most firmly “grounded in the teachings of Jesus himself, and that tradition passed on by his brothers.”²¹ Keith Akers argues that “the Ebionites understood Jesus better than any of the other groups in early Christianity and that conclusions about the historical Jesus need to be adjusted accordingly.”²² The main driving force behind such theories is the belief that the orthodox Christian view of Jesus as the preexistent, divine Son of God, born of a virgin, and proclaiming himself as the only way of salvation was a deviation from the original Jesus movement in which Jesus was simply a human teacher. The apostle Paul—whom the Ebionites strongly rejected—is commonly identified as the source of that deviation.²³

Speculations that the Ebionites represented most faithfully the earliest tradition of Jesus’ followers are fatally flawed in several ways. For the sake of brevity we can do no more here than to mention three of the most severe problems for such views. (1) Paul’s own epistles—the earliest documents in existence from the early Jesus movement—attest that despite some differences in focus and ministry he was not in fundamental conflict with the Jerusalem church or its apostles over the gospel (1 Cor. 15:3-11; Gal. 1-2).²⁴ (2) The Gospel and epistles of John, which show no influence of Pauline thought, nevertheless express in their own way the same basic understanding of the Christian faith—that Jesus is the preexistent divine Son and salvation is secured solely through faith in Christ (John 1:1-18; 5:18-23;8:24-28, 56-59; 16:28; 17:5; 20:27-31; 1 John 4:1-6; 5:13-21). Johannine scholarship in the last forty years or so has overturned the earlier conventional wisdom and demonstrated that the Johannine literature is thoroughly saturated in the first-century Jewish theological heritage and cultural milieu.²⁵ (3) Historical analysis of the New Testament writings and other documents from the first and early second centuries shows that belief in Jesus as the divine Son, Lord, and object of saving faith predated Paul’s writings, originating in the Aramaic-speaking, predominantly Jewish church.²⁶

The second theory concerning Ebionite origins is that the Ebionites arose in the late first or early second century as a group of Jewish Christians reacting to the fall of Jerusalem in ad 70 (or possibly the later events of the Bar Kochka revolt in the 130s). According to Richard Bauckham, there were “several differing types of Jewish Christianity” in the second century. The Nazarenes or Nazoreans, not the Ebionites, was “the group in most direct continuity with the pre-70 Jerusalem church”; unlike the Ebionites, they accepted the divine Christology attested in the New Testament writings.²⁷ Although both the Nazarenes and the Ebionites practiced circumcision and observed the Torah, the Nazarenes approved of Paul’s ministry while the Ebionites generally viewed Paul as a false apostle.

Bauckham concludes that “Ebionism originated, probably some time in the second century, as an attempt to reform Jewish Christianity by revising its beliefs.”²⁸ He suggests that the Ebionites were Jews who accepted the idea that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah but rejected the traditional Jewish-Christian belief that Jesus was the divine Son of God.²⁹ This seems to be the best assessment of the evidence available concerning the movement. They were strong enough to attract attention by the middle of the second century and remained one of many variant forms of Christian faith for at least the next couple of centuries.

Who Where the Gnostics?—

The word “Gnostic” is an Anglicized form of the Greek adjective gnōstikos, coined by the fourth-century bc philosopher Plato from the noun gnōsis (“knowledge”) to describe the pure or theoretical sciences that provided knowledge about the world (as distinct from practical knowledge or skill in doing things).³⁰ The first extant use of the term (which does not appear in the Greek Bible) to describe adherents to a philosophy or belief system occurs about ad 180 in Irenaeus’s Against Heresies.³¹ This book, then, provides our first explicit references to the Gnostics as well as to the Ebionites. Irenaeus’s main focus in this work, in fact, was “the so-called Gnostic sect” (1.11.1) of those who he says “call themselves Gnostics” (1.25.6).³² Such statements by Irenaeus and other ancient writers, both non-Christian (Celsus, Porphyry) and Christian (Clement of Alexandria³³), would seem to indicate that one or more groups dating from at least the second century ad referred to themselves as Gnostics.³⁴

The original title of Irenaeus’s work was On the Detection and Overthrow of What Is Falsely Called Knowledge, an allusion to Paul’s warning to Timothy to avoid the “contradictions of what is falsely called ‘knowledge’ [gnōsis]” (1 Tim. 6:20). Paul’s reference to the gnōsis of false teachers raises the much-debated question of whether some of the teachers whose views Paul opposed were the theological forebears of the second-century Gnostics. In 1954 Walter Schmithals argued in his doctoral dissertation written under Rudolf Bultmann that Gnosticism predated Christianity and that Paul’s opponents in Corinth were Jewish-Christian Gnostics.³⁵ Bultmann himself had argued that a “redeemer myth” in pre-Christian Gnosticism formed much of the background for the Gospel of John—ironically, a view that Schmithals rejected years later.³⁶ Since Edwin Yamauchi’s 1973 monograph on Pre-Christian Gnosticism thoroughly critiquing the idea of a Gnostic redeemer myth as a source for Christianity, such an approach to Gnostic origins has faded as a scholarly option.³⁷

Already we have gotten somewhat ahead of ourselves, as the debate over when Gnosticism began obviously turns on what “Gnosticism” means. The seemingly simple and obvious answer is that it refers to the religious sect or movement whose members Irenaeus said referred to themselves as “Gnostics,” but this answer turns out not to be satisfactory for several reasons. Scholars now have access to a treasure trove of literature that was produced by people that we would expect from Irenaeus’s information to call themselves Gnostics; yet nowhere in this literature do the writers refer to themselves or to their community as Gnostics.³⁸ Furthermore, Irenaeus and other early church fathers use the term gnōstikoi for various groups, some of which do not seem to belong to the same “family” of religious beliefs as others.

Lacking evidence of groups for whom “Gnostic” was a self-designation, and being dissatisfied with the patristic classifications of ancient Christian-based sects, modern scholars have tried to develop Gnosticism as a classification based either on a single core element or on a cluster of “family resemblances” that various sects or groups shared.³⁹ This has also proved difficult, so much so that Michael Allen Williams argues that all such classification approaches to defining Gnosticism have failed and proposes that the term Gnosticism be abandoned.⁴⁰ The usual and most significant features said to characterize Gnosticism include the following:

• The absolute God is not the creator, but from that nameless, unknowable
  God came emanations and semi-divine beings typically called aeons (or aions)
  and archons.
• The world is thought to have been made by a lower deity (demiurge),
  which traditional Jews and Christians had confused with the absolute or
  preeminent God.
• Each human being has a part or piece of the divine within that has been
  trapped or imprisoned or deceived by this material world (a view often
  called anti-cosmic dualism).
• Christ is a divine spirit or piece of the divine that descended or fell from
  the highest level or realm and that spoke and acted in and through Jesus
  in order to reveal the secret knowledge (gnōsis) of the divine within each of us
  and how we may escape the limitations of the material world.

Despite the misgivings of some scholars about the category of Gnosticism, the term continues to be generally accepted in reference to a number of more or less similar groups and teachings that flourished in the second and third centuries. Indeed, Gnosticism is a topic of major interest not only in the academic study of early Christianity but in the broader contemporary culture. Fueling the heightened interest in the subject was the discovery in December 1945 of a collection of ancient texts in Nag Hammadi, a city on the west bank of the Nile in southern Egypt. The Nag Hammadi library consists of a dozen codices (bound volumes) dating from the third and fourth centuries in which were copied 56 separate texts, most of which scholars generally classify as Gnostic or at least related to Gnosticism. The most famous of these texts is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of apparently loosely arranged “sayings” of Jesus, most of which do not appear in the New Testament. Other Nag Hammadi texts dubbed “gospels” include the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Philip. Another notable text in the collection is the Apocryphon of John (which appears in three of the volumes), the contents of which Irenaeus evidently describes in his book.⁴¹

The publication of The Nag Hammadi Library in English ⁴² in 1977 made these works available to the public, and Elaine Pagels’s popular book The Gnostic Gospels ⁴³ in 1979 laid down the basic narrative of how mainstream scholarship and the media have viewed these writings for the past thirty years. Orthodox Christianity, we are told, is simply one of many streams of Christian belief that was flowing in the early centuries following the death of Jesus, the stream that happened to emerge politically victorious in the fourth century. Instead of speaking of “Christianity” as if there was only one legitimate form and all other versions were “heresies,” we should think of these recently rediscovered streams of Christian belief as “lost Christianities,” as Bart Ehrman has put it.⁴⁴

Although many people find the Gnostic writings fascinating and some even claim to find them inspirational, their importance in this postmodern culture is not that they provide a viable alternative form of Christianity. There are people today who identify themselves as Gnostics, but most of the interest in Gnosticism today comes from people who consider Gnosticism useful, not true. The real importance of the Gnostic writings, as many see it, is that they undermine the claim of conservative Christians that the teachings of the New Testament are normative for Christian faith. Most of the scholars and popularizers excited about the Gnostic gospels don’t want to add them to the canon; they want to use them to call into question the whole idea of a canon. In short, if Christianity could mean any number of things in the ancient world, this leaves people free today to redefine Christianity to mean whatever suits them.

Such a perspective makes sense if Christianity is merely a religious philosophy subject to revision and adaptation for different communities or cultures. However, if Christianity is about the person of Jesus of Nazareth, presumably some forms of Christianity are more faithful than others to who and what Jesus was.

What we know about the Gnostic “gospels” both in terms of their origins and their content amply justifies the conclusion that they are practically useless as sources of information about the historical Jesus. For that matter, generally speaking, they don’t even claim to present historical information about Jesus. Most of these works contain little or no narrative and are not in any sense biographies of Jesus, in contrast to the four canonical Gospels.⁴⁵ Instead, they are collections of supposed sayings of Jesus (Thomas), fanciful stories of Jesus’ mischievous miracles as a youth (Infancy Gospel of Thomas), fictitious dialogues of Jesus speaking to various Gospel figures (Mary, Judas, Apocryphon of John), a sermon or homily (Truth), or a mixture of such materials (Philip). It is in fact misleading to call these texts “gospels” at all.

The Gnostic writings are all, or nearly all, demonstrably later than any of the New Testament writings. Most scholars agree on dating the Nag Hammadi writings and
other Gnostic texts to the second and third centuries.46 The only Gnostic gospel for which a significant minority of scholars suggests a date in the first century is Thomas, but even here the dominant view places it in the early second century.47 On the other hand, mainstream, nonevangelical scholarship dates the four canonical Gospels between the late 60s and the late 90s of the first century.48 Thus Bart Ehrman, for example, admits that even though some of their contents may have sources going back to the first century, “the noncanonical Gospels are of greater importance for understanding the diversity of Christianity in the second and third and later centuries than for knowing about the writings of the earliest Christians.”49

For these and other reasons, most biblical scholars, even those opposed to conservative Christian beliefs, acknowledge that the canonical Gospels are far superior as sources of information about the historical Jesus than the Gnostic and other non-canonical gospels. For example, James Tabor admits, “It remains the case that our most reliable sources for reconstructing what we can know about Jesus are the New Testament gospels themselves.”50

Simply reading the Gnostic gospels ought to be sufficient to persuade readers familiar with the prevailing Jewish religious and cultural mindset of first-century Galilee and Judea that they do not come close to duplicating the authentic voice of Jesus heard in the canonical Gospels. Consider, for example, the contrasting ways in which the Gospels of Matthew and Thomas represent Jesus speaking of his ongoing presence:

Matthew : “For where two or three
are gathered in my name, there I am
among them” (18:20).
Thomas: “I am the light which is above
everything; I am the All; the All came
forth from me and the All has returned
to me. Split the wood and I am there;
lift up the stone and you will find me
there” (77).

Or listen to the difference in the way the two writings represent Jesus speaking about entering the kingdom of God:

Matthew : “Truly, I say to you, unless
you turn and become like children,
you will never enter the kingdom of
heaven” (18:3).
Thomas : “When you make the two
one, and when you make the inner as
the outer and the outer as the inner and
the upper as the lower, and when you
make the male and the female into a
single one, so that the male is not male
and the female is not female, when
you make eyes in place of an eye, and
a hand in place of a hand, and a foot
in place of a foot, an image in place
of an image, then you shall enter the
kingdom” (22).

Conservative New Testament scholar Craig Evans has made the following wry comment:
“When students ask me why certain Gospels were omitted from the canon of the New Testament and whether some of them ought to be included, I tell them to read these
Gospels They do, and that answers their questions.”51

Robert M. Bowman Jr. is the director of research for the Institute for Religious Research (http://www.irr.org). He has taught courses in apologetics, biblical studies, theology, and religious studies at Luther Rice University, Biola University, and Cornerstone University. He is the author of nearly 60 articles and the author or co-author of twelve books, including Faith Has Its Reasons (Paternoster) and Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ (Kregel).

Notes
1 Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
2 Karen L. King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala:Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa, CA:Polebridge Press, 2003), 39.
3 For a thorough review of the patristic material pertaining to the Ebionites, see A. F. J. Klijn and G. J. Reinink, Patristic Evidence for Jewish-Christian
Sects, NovTSup 36 (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 19-43.
4 For the chapter on the Ebionites, see The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Book I (Sects 1-46), trans. Frank Williams, 2nd rev. and expanded ed., Nag
Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 63 (Leiden:Brill, 2008), 131-65. Citations from the Panarion are to this edition (using the standard notation).
5 A notable scholar recently arguing that this material was Ebionite is Richard Bauckham, “The Origin of the Ebionites,” in Image of the Judaeo-Christians in
Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature, ed. Peter J. Tomson and Doris Lambers-Petry; WUNT 158 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 167-80. The difficulties of establishing any firm conclusions from the Pseudo-Clementine literature, a hodge-podge of texts of confusing interrelationships from different centuries in different languages, have been helpfully reviewed in Graham Stanton, “Jewish Christian Elements in the Pseudo-Clementine Writings,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries, ed.
Oskar Skarsoune and ReidaHvalvik (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), 305-324.
6 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 48.4, 49.1, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1885), rev. and ed. Kevin Knight (New Advent, 2009), volume 1, online: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0128.htm. All quotations from the church fathers are from this online edition of the ANF unless indicated otherwise.
7 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.21.1; 4.33.4; 5.1.3.
8 Ibid., 1.26.2; see also 3.15.1, which does not mention the Ebionites by name but is clearly critiquing their view of Paul.
9 See especially Epiphanius, Panarion 30.3.1-6; 30.14.4-5; 16.3-4.
10Epiphanius, Panarion 30.13.4-5.
11 A. F. J. Klijn, Jewish-Christian Gospel Traditions, VCSup 17 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 67-68; Craig A. Evans, “The Jewish Christian Gospel Tradition,” in
Jewish Believers in Jesus, ed. Skarsoune and Hvalvik, 250 n. 34.
12Modern chapter summaries in Irenaeus (found in the ANF edition) refer to Ebion, but Irenaeus himself never did.
13Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 14; Prescription against Heretics 33 (where the ANF spells his name Hebion).
14 Epiphanius, Panarion 30.17.1.
15Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 1-5, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, Fathers of the Church 103 (Washington, DC: Catholic University
of America Press, 2001), 234 (3.11.2).
16 Origen, Against Celsus 2.1; Epiphanius, Panarion 30.17.2-3.
17 Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. Robert E. Heine, Fathers of the Church 71 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982),
95 (Hom.Genesis 3.5).
18Cf. Oskar Skarsaune, “The Ebionites,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus, ed. Skarsoune and Hvalvik, 427.
19All biblical quotations are taken from the English
Standard Version (esv), 2011 edition.
20 A point ignored, e.g., by Robert Eisenman, who tries to argue that the Ebionites were the followers of James; see The New Testament Code: The Cup of
the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ (New York: Sterling, 2006), 145.
21James D. Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006,
2007), 302-303.
22Keith Akers, The Lost Religion of Jesus: Simple Living and Nonviolence in Early Christianity (New York:
Lantern Books, 2000), 218.
23The literature expressing views along these lines, naturally with considerable variations, is legion. See, for example, Hyam MacCoby, The Mythmaker:
Paul and the Invention of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 1987); Robert H. Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of
Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Penguin, 1997); Jeffrey J. Bütz, The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity (Rochester, VT:
Inner Traditions, 2005).
24Useful treatments of Paul’s relationship to the Jesus tradition and to the Jerusalem church include David Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of
Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1997); Paul Barnett, Paul, Missionary of Jesus, After Jesus, Vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,2008).
25 Among the many works that might be mentioned see, for example, Gale A. Yee, Jewish Feasts and the Gospel of John(Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier,
1989); Lars Kierspel, The Jews and the World in the Fourth Gospel, WUNT 2/220 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); Richard Bauckham and Carl Mosser, eds., The Gospel of John and Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).
26 See Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); and for a more thematic overview of the New Testament evidence, Robert M. Bowman Jr. and J. Ed Komoszewski, Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2007).
27 Bauckham, “Origin of the Ebionites,” 162.
28 Ibid., 174.
29 Ibid., 175.
30 Plato, Statesman 258-59, cited and discussed in Bentley Layton, “Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Gnosticism,” in Doctrinal Diversity: Varieties of Early Christianity, ed. Everett Ferguson, Recent Studies in Early Christianity 4 (New York: Garland,1999), 108-109 (106-122).
31 Even here, scholars depend on quotations from later Christian writers, especially Hippolytus and Epiphanius, to reconstruct the Greek text of
Irenaeus’s work, which is known to us primarily in Latin translation.
32 Translation mine.
33 Clement also speaks frequently in the Stromata (“Miscellanies”) of “the gnostic,” referring not to a member of a Gnostic sect but to a true or ideal Christian who has advanced in spiritual understanding.
34 Layton, “Prolegomena,” 110.
35 Walter Schmithals, Gnosticism in Corinth: An Investigation of the Letters to the Corinthians, trans. John E. Steely, 2d ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971).
36 See Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Pre-Christian Gnosticism, the New Testament, and Nag Hammadi in Recent Debate,” Themelios 10 (1984): 23 (22-27).
37 Edwin M. Yamauchi, Pre-Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Proposed Evidence, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1973; 2nd ed., 1983); see also his
later essay, “The Issue of Pre-Christian Gnosticism Reviewed in Light of the Nag Hammadi Texts,” in The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years: Proceedings of
the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration, ed. John D. Turner and Anne McGuire; Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 44 (Leiden: Brill, 1997),72-88.
38 Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996),32-33.
39 E.g., Le Originidello Gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina, 13-18 Aprile 1966, ed. Ugo Bianchi, Studies in the History of Religions 12 (Leiden: Brill, 1967).
40 This is the conclusion of Williams, Rethinking. Another recent critique of the category of Gnosticism is Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism?(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press—Belknap Press, 2003), though she also thinks that such “constructs” as Judaism, Christianity, or even religion are similarly
unhelpful (3).
41 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.29.
42 The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row; Leiden: Brill, 1977).
43 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
44 Ehrman, Lost Christianities (see n. 1).
45 See especially Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, SNTSMS 70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992; 2nd ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Dearborn, MI: Dove Booksellers, 2004). As Burridge points out (242), some of the Jewish-Christian
“gospels” probably were biographical in genre, but unfortunately no substantial copies of these works are extant.
46 See, e.g., the comments on the dates of seventeen non-canonical so-called gospels in Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the
New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7-89. Ehrman’s dates for these works are representative of mainstream scholarship.
47 Nicholas Perrin, Thomas: The Other Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), argued for a date in the last quarter of the second
century, but his case has garnered little support outside of conservative evangelical circles.
48 See, for example, the articles on each of the four Gospels in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman, 6 Vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
49 Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 4th ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 221.
50 Tabor, Jesus Dynasty, 43.
51 Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 98-99.

(First published in Areopagus Journal Vol. 12 No. 1 – Lost Christianities?)