Some church writers of the early third century, puzzled by a sect of Jewish believers called the Ebionites, decided that the name must come from a founder, and invented one. They called him Ebion and gave him opinions. A great teacher of Alexandria, more learned and less charitable, said instead that the Ebionites were named for the poverty of their understanding. Neither was right. Ebionim is simply the Hebrew word for the poor, and the people who bore it had taken it from the oldest vocabulary of their faith. It was not an insult. It was a title, and before the church writers turned it into the name of a heresy, it had been a name for the whole community of the Way.
The Poor of the Psalms and the Scrolls
In the psalms the poor and needy are not merely those without money. They are those who have no helper but God, who wait on him because they have nothing else to wait on, and whom he hears because they are not too proud to cry out. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him. The word carries hunger and humility and trust together, and the prophets use it for the faithful remnant of Israel when the powerful have gone astray.
The desert community took the title for itself. Among the scrolls is a commentary on the thirty-seventh psalm, the psalm that says the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace, and the commentary reads it as a promise to the congregation of the poor, who will possess the whole earth as an inheritance. The hymns speak of God redeeming the soul of the poor one. The commentary on Habakkuk says the Wicked Priest plotted to destroy the poor. A member of the Unity, having given his goods to the common treasury, was poor in fact as well as in spirit, and proud of it.
A student who knows the Sermon on the Mount will already have heard the echo. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth: the same verse of the same psalm, read in the same way, by a teacher who began his own list of blessings with the poor.
The Poor in Jerusalem
When Paul went up to Jerusalem to lay his gospel before the pillars of the community, they gave him the right hand of fellowship and asked only one thing of him: that he remember the poor. He spent years afterward gathering a collection among the Gentile churches for, as he put it, the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. Many readers have taken this as a description of a needy congregation, and so it was. But it may also have been a name. The community that held all things in common, that sold its fields and laid the price at the apostles' feet, may simply have called itself the poor, as the community by the Dead Sea had done before it.
What the Church Writers Said
A bishop in Gaul, writing late in the second century, gives the earliest description of the Ebionites. They use only the gospel according to Matthew. They reject the apostle Paul, calling him an apostate from the Law. They are circumcised and keep the customs of the Law, and they pray facing Jerusalem, honoring it as the house of God. They hold that Jesus was the son of Joseph, born as other men are.
The great teacher of Alexandria knew two kinds of Ebionites, one that accepted the virgin birth and one that did not. The bishop of Salamis, two centuries after the first description, adds more. They wash daily, and again after any defilement. They refuse to eat flesh. They hold that Christ was not begotten but created, like one of the archangels but greater, set over the angels and over all the works of God. They have taken in the book of the prophet Elxai, who also joined the Ossaeans. And they have a gospel of their own.
It is especially hard to tell the Ebionites from the Nazarenes, as an old Jewish encyclopedia admits, and the church writers themselves confused them. The fellowship's working distinction is this. The Nazarenes, as the monk of Bethlehem met them, believed what the church believed about Christ and kept the Law as Jews. The Ebionites held a lower view of Christ, a sharper view of Paul, and a stricter view of the table. Both were Jewish followers of Jesus who would not give up the Law. Both were, in the end, given up by the church.
Their Gospel
The bishop quotes the Ebionites' gospel in order to refute it, and so preserves a few sentences. They are among the most arresting lines the fellowship knows.
Of John who baptized, it says that his food was wild honey, whose taste was the taste of manna, like a cake made with oil. The gospels the church kept say locusts and wild honey; in Greek the word for locust and the word for cake are nearly the same, and the Ebionites, who would eat no flesh, read the word that made John's food bread. When Jesus came up from the water, it says, a great light shone around the place.
And it has Jesus say: I have come to abolish the sacrifices, and if you do not cease from sacrificing, the wrath will not cease from you. When the disciples ask where they should prepare the Passover, he answers with a question: have I desired with desire to eat this flesh, the Passover, with you? The gospel of Luke has him say, with desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you. The Ebionites added two words and turned his longing into a refusal.
The fellowship is honest about these lines. They are almost certainly changes to an older text, made by a community that had already decided against the altar and the meat it produced. They do not tell us what Jesus ate. They tell us what his poorest followers believed he would have wanted, and how far they were willing to go to keep the table clean. The Sanctity of Life page takes this same direction and says plainly where it comes from.
Were They Essenes?
The parallels are many. The name of the poor. The daily washing in living water. The common purse. The refusal of the temple's sacrifices. The expectation of a true prophet like Moses. Some modern scholars have gone further and argued that the Ebionites are our best clue to what the first followers of John and Jesus and James actually were: Jews who shared a restorationist hope, drawn from Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel and the first chapters of Genesis, of a renewed people living as Adam and Eve lived in the garden, without killing, under the reign of God. On this view the labels Essene, Nazarene, Ebionite, and Jewish Christian are all later boxes into which a single stream was poured.
The fellowship finds this view attractive and keeps it at a little distance. The desert community, unlike the Ebionites, legislated for sacrifice in its temple of the future and ate meat at its settlement. The Ebionites knew Jesus, and the scrolls never mention him. A stream can flow through many channels without every channel being the same. But we agree that the boxes mislead. The people in them did not know they were in boxes.
Poverty as a Way
What the fellowship takes from the poor is not a doctrine but a direction. The Essenes despised riches, the historian says, and among them no one was richer than another. The healers by the lake gave their property away before they went to live in their cells. The grandsons of Jude showed an emperor their calloused hands. The Ebionites took a name that their enemies thought shameful and wore it as a crown.
The fellowship's students are not asked to give up their houses. Most of us could not and should not. We are asked to hold what we have loosely, to want less than we are told to want, and to notice who has less than we do. The Fasting and Simplicity page describes the gradual shedding. We add one practice in the spirit of this page. Once in each season, give away one thing you would miss: not the thing you do not need, which is housekeeping, but the thing you do, which is poverty in the old sense. Then notice what it costs you, and whether the cost was the point.