Petri Luomanen is professor of New Testament and early Christian culture and literature at the University of Helsinki. The topic of this book, an outgrowth of earlier work on Matthew, is early Jewish Christians and their gospels. The book is a monograph based on journal articles that have been reworked to which he has added new research.
The book argues that there are two second-century Jewish-Christian gospels: the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Ebionites. Previous scholarship conjectures the existence of a third text, the “Gospel of the Nazarenes” but Luomanen does not think that it exists. Luomanen assesses whether extant fragments from these two gospels contain old traditions dating back to pre-synoptic times. Evidence for these texts comes from fragments in the writings of the so-called church fathers from the second to the fifth century CE whose witness is tinged by assessments of these sources as suspect.
Amongst the varieties of Jewish Christianities are the Jewish Christianity of Irenaeus's Ebionites, an offshoot of the earliest Jerusalem community. Irenaeus wrote in the second century from Lyons in France and was unlikely to have had contact with the Ebionites but their form of Jewish Christianity involved obedience to the Jewish Law, anti-Paulinism, rejection of Jesus' virgin birth, reverence for Jerusalem (evident in the direction of prayer), use of Matthew's gospel, and Eucharist with water. Origen's references to Ebionites are disparaging—he takes their name “poor” to mean their poor intellect and literal understanding of the law. Two hundred years later, Epiphanius describes Ebionites in similar terms as Irenaeus, but their explicit rejection of the temple and its cult, the idea of the True Prophet, and the (selective) acceptance of part of the Pentateuch only marks Epiphanius's Ebionites as distinctive. Luomanen thinks they may have been successors of the Hellenistic “poor” of the early Jerusalem community. Irenaeus's Ebionites, on the other hand, were closer to the Hebrews of the early Jerusalem community.
Epiphanius's sect of the Nazarenes seem to have been developed by Epiphanius himself as a purer type of Jewish Christianity over and against the Ebionites of his day. Jerome on the other hand had met Syriac Christians who were called Nazarenes from whom he obtained two anti-rabbinic collections: explanations of some chapters of Isaiah and a hand-picked collection of anti-rabbinic passages from the Gospel of Matthew. These Nazarenes were pro-Pauline.
Luomanen considers questions of origin. He conjectures that the Ebionites may have roots in the circle around Stephen, evident in a critical attitude toward the Jerusalem Temple (Acts 6) and the Hellenistic Jewish Christians of Acts. Samaritan Christians may have resulted from the work of Philip in Samaria who, with the Hellenists, was dispersed around Judea and Samaria (Acts 8:1–3). Criticism of the temple cult in Jerusalem would have been well received among Samaritans. Acts also refers to Cyprus as the target of the missionary work following Stephen's execution (Acts 11:19–20). Of course Luke would not have condoned these religious beliefs and indeed identifies false prophets and magicians like Simon in Samaria and Bar-Jesus in Cyprus (Acts 8:4–25).
Luomanen hypothesizes that Jewish Christian Gospels, the Diatessaron, and the Gospel of Thomas are independent but related at the post-synoptic pre-Diatessaronic stage in the development of Jewish Christian Gospel traditions. He argues that the Gospel of the Hebrews, like the Gospel of the Ebionites is a post-synoptic composition that has clear connections to harmonizing gospel traditions.
Close connections between the Gospel of the Hebrews and Q indicate that both emphasize Wisdom traditions and Spirit possession. If the Gospel of the Ebionites connects with the Hellenistic-Samaritan branch of the successors of the earliest Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, could the Gospel of the Hebrews represent the Hebrew branch of the Jerusalem community? The closest connections to the Gospel of the Hebrews seem to be found in Q and the Gospel of Matthew.
In the second century when both the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Ebionites were composed, there were still many different Jewish-Christian groups using written and oral traditions. Heresiological discourse was not yet developed. Christ-believers in continuity with earlier Jewish identity and practices were not in need of foundation stories. They had the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint and come collections of Jesus' teachings. The gospels of the New Testament that came into being seem to reflect the perspective of the more liberal Hellenistic wing of earliest Christianity because they were more in need of legitimating their position in relation to Jewish traditions. Once these Greek gospels of the New Testament existed, it seems that the “Hebrews” and the “Ebionites” wrote gospels stories of their own from Jesus traditions.
While this is not an easy book to read, and there are occasional infelicities of grammar (239), the arguments are careful and persuasive and the book is an important contribution to understanding a history of early Jewish Christianity.
