More complex is the second question, as to how the Ebionite view of Jesus emerged. But the answer has already been indicated in terms of the myth-theory. And the question really cannot be answered on the biographical view, for the canonical documents give no hint[19] of a persistence of a “human” view among the early Christists as against a “divine” one. The Judaizers are represented equally with the Paulinists as making Jesus “Lord”; and it is on the Paulinist side that we hear of adherents who do not believe in the resurrection. That is really a divergence from the Judaistic view, for Jews in general accepted immortality. The moment, however, we put the hypothesis of a primitive cult of a Saviour-God whose sacrifice in some way benefits men, and whose Sacrament is the machinery of that benefit, we account for all the varieties of Jesuism known to us. The cult was primordially Semitic, a thing on the outskirts of later Judaism, which would be Judaized in so far as it came under Jewish influence, and then theologically re-cast for Gentilism by Gentilizing Jews. Thus there would be Judaistic Ebionites, and Jesuists such as those taught by the Didachê, who would insist on connecting Jesus only with the Eucharist, making him a subordinate figure, upon whose legend were slowly grafted moral teachings.
On the other hand there would be non-Jewish Jesuists who valued the Sacrament as they and others valued those of Paganism, counting on magical benefits from it (as “Catholics” in general did for many centuries), but making light of the Jewish future life. The one thing in common was the primordial sacrament, at once Jewish and non-Jewish. For Jews it would easily connect with the belief in immortality, already much connected with Messianism; for Gentiles who accepted the former belief, it would be still more easily connected with a doctrine of future individual salvation. All is broadly intelligible on the myth-theory. On the biographical theory, the Jesuists of the Didachê are as inexplicable as the Gentile Jesuists who denied a future life, or the Docetists who denied that Jesus had come in the flesh.
Given such Jewish Jesuists, and given Docetism, the invention of sayings and episodes in which Jesus is thwarted or flouted, or disavows Godhood, is perfectly simple. Why Professor Schmiedel should raise the question of “wickedness” in this connection I cannot divine. On his own showing, the invention of sayings and episodes was normal among the Christists in general; and it affected all of the synoptics. Does he impute “wickedness” to the author of the fourth gospel, whom he represents as inventing discourses and episodes systematically? The Ebionites and Docetists had as much right to invent as any one else; and once their inventions were current, they stood a fair chance of being embodied in a gospel or gospels by reason of the general incapacity of the Christists for critical reflection.
From the biographical standpoint, the Ebionites and their counterparts the Nazaræans are indeed enigmatic. It is important to have a clear view of what is known as to both sects.[20] Origen, noting that the Hebrew name of the former means “the poor,” angrily implies that it was given to them as describing their poverty of mind,[21] but leaves open the rational inference that the name originally described their chosen social status, which connected with a belief in the speedy end of the world. In his book Against Celsus,[22] he tells that they include believers in the Virgin Birth and deniers of it. Here arises the surmise that the former were the socii Ebionitarum mentioned by Jerome, who diverged from Judaic views, and may have been of the general cast of the Nazaræans.[23] These bodies constituted the mass of the Christians in Judæa in the second century. According to the ecclesiastical tradition, the church of Jerusalem had withdrawn during the siege to Pella and the neighbouring region beyond the Jordan. In the reign of Hadrian, after the revolt and destruction of the Messiah Bar-Cochab, who had attempted to rebuild the temple, the new Roman city of Ælia Capitolina was built on the ruins of Jerusalem; and in that no Jews were permitted to dwell. Only those Christians who renounced Judaic usages, then, could enter; and a number of such Christians, Jew and Gentile, did so. Others, probably including both Ebionites and Nazaræans, remained at Pella, and these appear to have furnished the types of heresy discussed by Irenæus, Origen, Jerome, and Epiphanius under the head of Ebionism. Those who set up in Jerusalem were in the way of substituting for “voluntary poverty” a propaganda and organization which meant comfort. Those who stayed behind would represent the primitive type.
Now, neither Ebionism nor Nazaræanism offers any semblance of support for the biographical view. Some Ebionites denied the Virgin Birth; some, presumably the Nazaræans in particular, accepted it, the latter being described as accepting the canonical Matthew (or a Hebrew gospel nearly equivalent) with the present opening chapters, while the Ebionites had a Matthew without them. Of the two views, neither testified to any impression made by a “personality.” The Virgin Birth myth is a reversion to universal folk-lore by way of enlarging the supernaturalist claim: the Ebionite denial is either a rejection of all purely human claim for Jesus or only supernaturalism with a difference, inasmuch as it inferribly posits a divinization of the Founder either at the moment of his baptism or at his anointing. His “personality” is the one thing never heard of in the discussion, so far as we can trace it. In one account, “the” Ebionites are said to have alleged that Christ became so because he perfectly fulfilled the law, and that they individually might become Christs if they fulfilled it as perfectly.[24] Ebionites and Nazaræans between them, on the biographical view, let slip all knowledge of the Sacred Places, of Golgotha, of the place of the Sepulchre.
If it be asked how, on the biographical view, there came to be Jewish Jesuists of the Ebionite type, men such as those described by Justin Martyr and his Jewish antagonist Trypho, believing in a Jesus “anointed by election” who thus became Christ, but adhering otherwise to Judaic practices,[25] what is the answer? What idea, what teaching, had Jesus left them? The notion which seems to have mainly differentiated Ebionites from Jews was simply that Jesus had been the Messiah, and that his Second Coming would mean the end of the world. Expectation of the Second Coming would at once promote and be promoted by poverty, which would thus have a special religious significance. Nazaræans, on the other hand, were latterly marked by a general opposition to the Pharisees.[26] But this could perfectly well be a simple development of sectarianism. If it be claimed as a result of the teaching of Jesus, what becomes of the other teaching as to the love of enemies? Which species of teaching is supposed to have represented the “personality”?
Given a general hostility between Nazaræans and Pharisees, the ascription of anti-Pharisaic teachings to the Master would have been in the ordinary way of all Jewish doctrinal propaganda. In so far as they acclaimed sincerity and denounced formalism, they are intelligible as part of a general revolt against Judaic legalism. Nazaræans would invent anti-Pharisaic teachings just as they or “Catholics” would invent pro-Samaritan teachings. And in so far as the Ebionites resisted the assimilation of fresh supernaturalist folk-lore they would tend to put appropriate sayings in the mouth of the Master just as did the others. They are expressly charged not only with inventing a saying[27] in denunciation of sacrifices, by way of sanctifying their vegetarianism, which was presumably an aspect of their poverty, but of tampering in various ways with their texts.[28] This is precisely what the gospel-makers in general did; and to impeach the Ebionites in particular is merely to ignore the general procedure. When, then, we say that Ebionites might well invent a saying in which the Master was made to repudiate Godhood, and that such a saying might find its way into many manuscripts, as did other passages from their Hebrew gospel, it is quite irrelevant to raise questions of “wickedness” and of “worship.”
But it is important here to note the point, insisted on by Professor W. B. Smith, that most of Professor Schmiedel’s “pillar” texts could be framed with no thought of lowering the status of Jesus, while some, on the contrary, betray the motive of discrediting the Jews. The story of Jesus’ people (οἱ παρ’ αὐτοῦ, not “friends” as in our versions) saying “He is beside himself” ([Mk. iii, 21]), is simply a Gentile intimation that even among his own kin or associates he was treated as a madman. The idea is exactly the same as that of the story in the fourth gospel, that “the Jews” said he “had a devil” and was a Samaritan. Similarly “tendential” is the avowal ([Mk. vi, 5]) that at Nazareth the wonder-worker “could do no mighty work ... and he marvelled because of their unbelief.” Healing in other texts is declared to depend on faith; and to call the people of Nazareth unbelievers was either to explain why Jesus of Nazareth there had no following or to emphasize the point that the Jews had rejected the Lord. Such a doctrine, again, as that of [Mt. xii, 31], that blasphemy against the Son of Man was pardonable, was perfectly natural at a stage at which the cult was seeking eagerly for converts. Had not Peter, in the legend, denied his Lord with curses, and Paul persecuted the Church to the death?
In other cases, the bearing of Professor Schmiedel’s texts is so much a matter of arbitrary interpretation that the debate is otiose; and in yet others there are insoluble questions of text corruption. The thesis that any text “could not have been invented,” and must infer the existence of a teacher regarded as mortal, is so infirm in logic that it is not surprising to find it regarded with bitter dislike by the orthodox, transparently honest as is Professor Schmiedel’s use of it.
There is really more force in his argument[29] that the predictions of the immediate re-appearance of the Christ after “the tribulation of those days” could not have been invented long after the fall of Jerusalem, the apparent impulse being rather to minimize them. They may perfectly well have been predictions made at the approach of danger by professed prophets. But it does not in the least follow that they were made by one answering to the description of the gospel Jesus, predicting his own Second Coming, though some one may have so prophesied. Any Messiah would be “the Lord”; and the gospel predictions as to false Christs tell of “many” Messiahs, every one of whom would speak as “the Lord.” Such utterances, after a little while, could no more be discriminated by the Christists than the certainly pre-Christian sayings put by their propagandists in the mouth of Jesus. And, once a prediction had been written down, it lived by the tenure of uncertainty that attached to all prediction among blind believers. When one “tribulation” had apparently passed without a Second Coming, there was nothing for it but to look forward to the next.