Theopedia

Ebionitism

“No one who denies the Son has the Father.”

— 1 John 2:23

Definition

Ebionitism was a first-century Jewish-Christian sect that held Jesus to be an ordinary man, born naturally of Joseph and Mary and distinguished from other men only by his exceptional holiness, not by any divine nature of his own.1 Its adherents continued to regard the Mosaic law as binding on Christians and rejected the apostle Paul’s teaching that it was not.1 The name is later applied more loosely to any teaching that minimizes or denies the deity of Christ.

Historical Origin

Ebionitism grew out of the same Jewish expectation of a nationalist, Davidic Messiah that led most of Israel to reject Jesus outright; those Jewish believers who did accept him as the Messiah but “were not able … to emancipate themselves from their former opinions and prejudices” came to regard him as a man singularly endowed by God rather than God himself.1 Charles Hodge notes that the group was never doctrinally uniform: ancient writers distinguish “Jewish Ebionites” from “Gnostic Ebionites,” who mixed the same low view of Christ’s person with elements of Gnostic philosophy.2 A closely related but distinct group, the Nazarenes, shared the Ebionites’ insistence on the Mosaic law’s continuing obligation but, unlike them, acknowledged Jesus’s virgin birth and so set him above other men, a difference Hodge treats as real enough that the two groups should not be conflated.2

Van Mastricht places the Ebionites among a cluster of first-century errors, alongside the Simonians, Cerinthians, and Merinthians, that denied Christ’s eternal deity “while the apostle John was still living,” when, on his reading, “the anti-Christ was already working.”3 The early church historian Eusebius is the principal ancient source for the sect’s errors; Jerome and Hilary of Poitiers, writing in the fourth century, both treat the Ebionite denial of Christ’s deity as having recurred in Photinus, with Hilary going so far as to call him “the Ebion of our day.”4

Core Tenets

The Ebionites’ distinguishing claim was that Jesus, “the son of Joseph and Mary,” was “distinguished from other men only by his holiness and his extraordinary endowments,” not by possessing a divine nature of his own.1 Bavinck observes that in their account of Christ’s work the Ebionites “regarded Christ only as a prophet who by his teaching and example gave people power for the struggle against sin,” rather than as the one whose atoning death satisfies divine justice.5 A. A. Hodge classifies the Ebionites, together with the “Alogi” (the deniers of the Logos), as an ancient form of the “Humanitarian” tendency: the view that God the Father alone is a divine person, and that Christ, whatever his moral or prophetic distinction, is not himself God.6 Consistent with their expectation of a Messiah who would restore Israel under the Mosaic law, the Ebionites also held that Christians remained bound to that law and, on this point, rejected Paul’s own teaching to the contrary.1

Confessional and Biblical Response

Against the Ebionite claim that Christ is merely human, the confession states that in the one divine being “there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided,” the Son “eternally begotten of the Father.”7 It states Christ’s deity and humanity together in its next chapter:

“The Son of God, the second person in the Holy Trinity, being very and eternal God, the brightness of the Father’s glory, of one substance and equal with him who made the world … did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon him man’s nature, with all the essential properties and common infirmities thereof, yet without sin.”8

Scripture makes the same claim the Ebionites denied. John opens his gospel by placing the Word, prior to his becoming flesh, on the Creator’s own side of the Creator-creature distinction: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1, 14). Thomas addresses the risen Christ as “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28); Paul calls him “our great God and Savior” (Titus 2:13) and states that “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9). John treats the denial of Christ as it stood behind Ebionitism as a mark of the “antichrist” already at work in his own lifetime: “Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? … No one who denies the Son has the Father” (1 John 2:22-23), a test he restates as confessing or denying “that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (1 John 4:2-3; 2 John 7).3

Modern Forms

A. A. Hodge draws an explicit line from the ancient Ebionites to a later movement: “These in the early Church were known by the name of Ebionites, and Alogi, the deniers of the Logos, while in the Modern Church they are known as Socinians.”6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ.,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 396. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Hodge, 397. ↩ ↩2

  3. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 24, “The Most Holy Trinity,” 2:548-549: “Among the pseudo-Christians, the Simonians, the Cerinthians, the Merinthians, the Ebionites, and others, in whom, while the apostle John was still living, the anti-Christ was already working, by denying the eternal deity of the Christ, were also by the same stroke denying the identity of essence among the three persons.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Steven Tshombe Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 172-173. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩

  6. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 9, “The Holy Trinity,” Q. 97, 195-196. ↩ ↩2

  7. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩

  8. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩