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We might affirm certain things of his individual tastes and tendencies; he is a very exact devotee; he insists that Jesus had performed all the Jewish rites, he is a warm Ebionite and democrat, that is to say, much opposed to property, and persuaded that the triumph of the poor is approaching; he likes especially all the anecdotes showing prominently the conversion of sinners the exaltation of the humble; he often modifies the ancient traditions in order to give them this meaning; he admits into his first pages the legends about the infancy of Jesus, related with the long amplifications, the spiritual songs, and the conventional proceedings which form the essential features of the Apocryphal Gospels.
The old Ebionite doctrine was that this Divine Logos, or Word, or Spirit of God entered Jesus at his baptism, and that he thereby became the Messiah, distinctively "the Son of God" by divine selection, and not by supernatural generation. There is no evidence that his disciples during his lifetime ever had the slightest conception that he had a supernatural birth.
We know that the Gospel according to the Hebrews in its Nazarene form omitted the whole section Matt. i. 18 ii. 23, containing the conception, the nativity, the visit of the Magi, and the flight into Egypt, all of which were found in Justin's Gospel; while in its Ebionite form it left out the first two chapters altogether.
The early Ebionite copies of the Greek translation and transcription did not contain the first two chapters, and consequently no reference to the supernatural birth. We are left to fall back on Luke and we will have to examine his story a little in detail. In all of its details, including the genealogy, it is quite different from that in Matthew.
It is, no doubt, possible that the first gospel may have lent to the words of Jesus an Ebionite colouring in some instances, and that now and then the third gospel may present us with a truer account. To this supremely important point we shall by and by return.
Thus, after revolving around the theological circle, we are surprised to find that the Sabellian ends where the Ebionite had begun; and that the incomprehensible mystery which excites our adoration, eludes our inquiry.
Often the martyr was regarded as an apostate by his brethren, and the Carpocratian Christian expired beneath the sword of the Roman executioners, excommunicated by the Ebionite Christian, the which Ebionite was anathema to the Sabellian.
The Ebionite Christians, who were the Christians of Palestine and probably had the safest traditions on this point, believed that Jesus "was the son of Joseph and Mary according to the ordinary course of human generation." His kinsmen were the leaders of the Christian community for several generations. But there is little use in laboring a point which is so obvious.
Placed on the confines of the Jewish and Gentile world, he labored to reconcile the Gnostic with the Ebionite, by confessing in the same Messiah the supernatural union of a man and a God; and this mystic doctrine was adopted with many fanciful improvements by Carpocrates, Basilides, and Valentine, the heretics of the Egyptian school.
The early Ebionite version did not contain the first two chapters, giving the account of the miraculous birth; but our author insists that these were cut off from the original, rather than added on, tho nobody knows which. He admits the last twelve verses to be spurious and added by a later hand.
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