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Although the first Christians were all of them Jews, with every year
that passed the influence of the Jewish Christians diminished, once the
Greeks, too, came into the Church. The failure of the efforts of one
section to enforce within the new religion the observance of the Mosaic
Law as such, was a very notable setback. The Gentile converts easily
outnumbered the Jewish and by the time of the death of St. Paul the
Jewish Christians were already a minority. In 62 they lost the Apostle
who seems to have been their especial leader -- James, the Bishop of
Jerusalem; and eight years later the armies of Vespasian and Titus,
destroying the Holy City and the last vestiges of independent Jewish
political organisation, ended inevitably the prestige of the church in
which Christianity had first been organised. There would now be no
repetition of the danger, which the Church had so recently escaped,
that it would present itself to the world as simply another Jewish
sect. The Roman soldiery had, in very grim fashion, crowned the work of
St. Paul.
But for all that Jerusalem was no more, razed to the very ground as Our
Lord had prophesied, with only the camp of the Tenth Legion to mark
where it had stood, its Christian population continued to lead a
collective life. Some vision had warned the bishop -- Simeon -- of the
coming troubles, and the faithful had left the city in time, and
settled at Pella, in the pagan country across the Jordan. Here for yet
another century and more they survived, isolated from the rest of the
Church and increasingly a prey to heretical developments. The belief in
the essential divinity of Our Lord changed into what was afterwards
called Adoptianism. He was-the child of Joseph and Mary and later,
because of his scrupulous fidelity to the Law, permitted to become the
Christ. That destiny is open to all his followers. Whence, among these
heretical Judeo- Christians -- the Ebionites -- a devotion to the Law
unsurpassed by the Pharisees themselves. Of the sacred books which
later formed the New Testament they possessed the Gospel of St.
Matthew. St. Paul they held in abhorrence as an apostate and a
perverter of the truth. The second generation of the Ebionites, through
contact with the Jewish sect of the Essenes, added yet other beliefs
and practices. They had their own theory of a double creation of good
and bad, perpetuated through the centuries in parallel lines of good
and of lying prophets, descendants of Adam and of Eve respectively.
More accurately, these are re-incarnations of the one prophet, and this
one prophet it is who has appeared in Jesus Christ. He is not God.
Circumcision is retained along with Baptism, a vegetarian diet is
prescribed, a daily bath, and, as a means of avoiding sexual sin,
marriage at the very beginning of puberty. In their Eucharist water
takes the place of wine. A still later development is that of the
Elkasaites of whose distinctive tenets, however, nothing is known with
certainty.
Ebionites and Elkasaites were of course heretics. Side by side with
them, however, but in ever dwindling numbers the Christian Church
survived for yet two centuries at least. St. Jerome writes of these
survivors to St. Augustine, and finds them sufficiently orthodox in
faith. Though they do not reject St. Paul, they cling steadfastly to
all the customs of the Jews. In an earlier generation they had produced
at least one writer Hegesippus, who, (c. 150), set himself to travel
throughout the world comparing his own faith with that professed by all
the bishops he encountered, and endeavouring to construct a pedigree of
orthodox teachers, linking the bishops of his day with the Apostles.
All the bishops he met agreed in doctrine and the doctrine was that
which he himself had been taught. Also he noted the names of the
bishops of the Roman Church down to Anicetus. It is evident from the
few references to these Jewish Christian Churches of the East, and from
the occasional confusion in what references we do possess, that they
had ceased to be more than a matter of archaeology to the learned men
who wrote about them. By the fifth century they are nothing more than
this, and thence on they are entirely lost to view.
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