The ancient group of Jesus followers referred to as the “Ebionites” or “Nazarenes” were slandered, damned, and declared heretics by the mainstream Christian Orthodox Church Fathers. In this dialogue with filmmaker Kameron Waters, I argue that they may well be one of our best clues to recovering what the original followers of John the Baptist, Jesus, and his brother James were all about — along with earlier evidence from Jewish movements we now call Enochian, Nasorean, and Essene/Dead Sea Scrolls.
I want to trace the roots of these movements to a utopian, restorationist vision grounded in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and the early chapters of Genesis. Here we find both unity and diversity — which problematizes any quick, easy categorization of the diverse Jesus Movement both before and after Jerusalem’s destruction by the Romans in 70 CE.
Dichotomous labels like “Jewish Christian” or “Judaeo-Christian” — and even terms like Enochian, Essene, Nazarene, and Ebionite as they came to be used by later Church Fathers, and still are in modern scholarship — are all, in their own way, misleading.
Here I offer a counter-approach and, with a small number of other scholars, connect the Ebionites to the mother Jerusalem Church of James the Just and his followers — leaving Paul’s relationship to that earliest moment deliberately ambiguous, given his imminent apocalyptic expectations.
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