There was also a political and military side to the triumph of Paul. Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem were devastated by two successive revolts against Rome (A.D. 66–73 and 132–35). Both Vespasian and Hadrian, the emperors who presided successively over these two Roman victories, instituted harsh measures against Jews in the Land of Israel and throughout the empire. Hundreds of thousands had been killed or taken away into slavery. The homeland was devastated and the capital of Jerusalem with its magnificent Temple was in ruins. It was increasingly unpopular to be Jewish or to identify with Jewish causes.
Tradition tells us that the Jerusalem-based Jewish-Christians, led by Simon, the successor of James, also of the dynastic bloodline of Jesus’ Davidic family, fled northeast into Transjordan, settling in areas around Pella and the district of Basan just before the outbreak of the First Jewish Revolt. We have no precise records of what happened to them, and we should probably not imagine them to be a solidly monolithic group with a central organization and agenda. What seems to have happened is that the movement scattered, and to some extent shattered, left without power or influence in the West, where Paul’s Gentile churches were thriving. As a result, their Jewish-Christian perspectives played little to no part in influencing what went into the New Testament. By the second and third centuries A.D., remnants of their movement appear to be divided into various sects and factions, variously named in our sources Ebionites, Nazoreans, Elkesaites, Cerinthians, and Symmachians.9 Unfortunately, most of what we know about these groups comes from orthodox Pauline Christian writers from the West who were eager to expose all forms of Jewish Christianity as heresy.
Despite their diversity there seem to be four general ideas that Jewish-Christian groups agreed upon: the eternal validity of the Torah of Moses, the acceptance of only the gospel of Matthew in Hebrew, the complete rejection of Paul as a heretic and apostate from the Torah, and the belief that Jesus was a human being, born of a mother and a father, chosen by God but not divine.10 The best-known group, and the one that drew the most fire from orthodox Pauline circles, were the Ebionites. They most likely got their name from the Q teaching of Jesus: “Blessed are you poor ones [Hebrew: ‘evyonim],” a designation that appears dozens of times in the Psalms and Prophets as a description of God’s true people in the last days. Irenaeus, one of our earliest sources on the Ebionites, describes them as follows:
They use the gospel according to Matthew only, and repudiate the apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the Torah . . . they practice circumcision, persevere in those customs which are enjoined by the Law, and are so Judaic in their style of life that they even adore Jerusalem as if it were the house of God. (Against Heresies 1.26.2)
The main issue that arises with regard to the Ebionites is whether their ideas represent a largely unbroken perspective and orientation stemming back to Jesus, James, and the original Jerusalem apostles, or whether they are a later sect of Jewish Christianity that radicalized itself in the second and third centuries. Given what we have seen in Paul’s own letters, including his charge that the apostles who oppose him are “servants of Satan,” it is certainly plausible to assume that the Ebionites represent a link to the Jerusalem apostles, at least in their main ideas. Their ideas also seem to fit well with our other earlier Jewish-Christian sources such as Q, the letter of James, and the Didache. Theirs was a thoroughly Jewish stance with a belief that Jesus was either a prophet or the Messiah, heralding the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God on earth.
A much more positive view of the Ebionite “gospel” is now embedded in the fourth-century documents we call the Pseudo-Clementines, which are made up of two major parts, the Homilies and the Recognitions. A document embedded in the whole called the Kerygmata Petrou, or the Preaching of Peter, is particularly valuable in this regard. This document claims to be a letter written by Peter to James the brother of Jesus. Peter complains that his letters have been interpolated and corrupted by those influenced by Paul so that they have become worthless. He urges James not to pass along any of his teachings to the Gentiles, but only to those members of the council of the Seventy whom Jesus had appointed. Paul is sharply censored as one who put his own testimony based on visions over the certainty of the direct teachings that the original apostles had from Jesus. The argument Peter makes is quite telling. He suggests that if people follow someone like Paul, who claims to have had visions of Jesus, how might one know he was not actually communicating with a demonic spirit impersonating Jesus? In contrast, if one goes by what Jesus actually taught to the original apostles, there is no possibility of such deception.
Scholars do not consider these materials to be authentic first-century documents, but they do appear to reflect later legendary versions of the very disputes that did occur during the lifetime of Paul, Peter, and James. They preserve for us some memory of the conflicts of which Paul’s letters provide only dim and one-sided glimpses. What is particularly striking about the Pseudo-Clementines is the strong emphasis on testing everything by James: “Believe no teacher unless he brings from Jerusalem the testimonial of James the Lord’s brother” (Recognitions 4:35).
Although the voices of these Jewish-Christians were gradually muted over the centuries as they largely disappeared from view, their perspectives, still embedded behind and between the lines of Paul’s authentic letters, as well as in these scattered ancient sources, can still be heard.
The ultimate irony with regard to what Christianity became is the possibility that these voices that no longer speak might well represent something closer to the message of Jesus than do the teachings of Paul or Christianity itself. What one ultimately concludes regarding that issue still rests today, as it did in the first centuries of the Christian era, on what value one places on Paul’s visionary experiences and his resulting claims to be directly communicating with Jesus. Trying to recover as best we can by historical methods what we can know about the life and teachings of Jesus and his earliest followers is one thing, whereas entering the world of Paul’s theological interpretation of the cosmic heavenly “Christ” is quite another. The task of a historian is to offer as clear a view of Paul’s own testimony in this regard as is possible from his own letters, while recovering to whatever extent possible those now silent voices who represented an earlier and alternative “Christianity before Paul.”
APPENDIX
THE QUEST FOR THE
HISTORICAL PAUL
What can we reliably know about Paul and how can we know it? As is the case with Jesus, this is not an easy question. Historians have been involved in what has been called the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” for the past 175 years, evaluating and sifting through our sources, trying to determine what we can reliably say about him.1 As it happens the quest for the historical Paul began almost simultaneously, inaugurated by the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur.2 Baur put his finger squarely on the problem: There are four different “Pauls” in the New Testament, not one, and each is quite distinct from the other. New Testament scholars today are generally agreed on this point.3