Table of Contents
Parent:: EbioniteCanon
Each church or congregation defines it's own canon: the Copts and the Ethiopians and the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East all have canons that differ from the Roman. (Even Luther was trying to make his own canon for a while.) And we don't see much debate having gone into the Roman one - it's basically what Athanasius put out in a pastoral letter that was adopted at the synod then council at Carthage. So we are free to make our own.
The Ebionæans according to Epiphanius in Panarion Book 1 30.13.6 had a Matthew without our first 2 chapters. Which means no virgin birth (something there is no strong need for) which means that Jesus' father was Joseph. That result is Jesus is of the Davidic line, which is a Hebrew prerequisite for being a Messiah. (Which may be the whole point for adding it to the early christian Matthew.)
The Ebionæans held that He acquired his divinity at his baptism: "this day I have begotten thee". The Holy Spirit was that dove that entered him by God's will, hence they're non/anti-Trinitarian, as was the early church - see Tertullian et al. The Ebionæans celebrate Epiphany as celebration of His baptism by the Holy Spirit, and did not practice paedobaptism.
We read Acts as a historical document, being a brief to the Roman procecutor of Paul, intended to help get Paul acquitted, and hence avoid the condemnation of Christianity as an Illicit Religion by the Romans. It is written to be pleasing to the pagan reader, and at the same time, describes to conflict bewteen Paul and the Ebionite Church.
We read Luke's Gospel as possibly a later version of a Hebrew Matthew, or an Aramaic Matthew in the Hebrew dialect. Matthew for us has primacy, but Luke is valued as well. As our Canon lacks the first 2 chapters of Matthew (or Luke), it lacks the Virgin Birth, so in that sense we would be classed as Nestorian. We are this in congruence with the Church of the East.
Jerome and lots of others make clear that the EarlyEbioniteMatthew was written in Aramaic using Hebrew letters, so we would probably follow the Assyrian ChurchOfTheEastPeshitta (ACoE) aramaic text, which they claim to have gotten from the Apostles Thomas and Bartholomew, and have preserved in Aramaic ever since. It resolves a whole lot of little issues, (see We ask WastheNewTestamentReallyWritteninGreek), but with regard tp the Ecanon, they don't have Revelation, Jude, 2Peter, 2John, 3John in theirs.
If you don't have the Paulines, you don't have to have Revelation 2,3 or James or Jude, so you could follow the ACoE and drop those 5. (On the other hand, they may be absent from the CoE canon because they were not yet circulating at the time the canon was finalized, < 180 AD.)
Similar to the approach of Carlstadt at the beginning of the reformation, we could order the books by importance, or rate them on a scale of 1-10 (lowest most important), with Matthew the sole 1, and the others books further down the list.
Anything attributed to Paul is probably written later by the Marcionites, e.g. (1Cor. 15:26) - we ask if DidMarcionWritePaulsLetters? We could add back books that were early christian: pre-Nicaea, pre-Constantine, pre-Roman (perhaps pre-Greek), pre-Latin emendations. So we can add TheDidache as a community rule, and perhaps things from of the NagHamadhi library; there have been more early texts discovered in the last 180 years, than in the previous 1800!
The Ebionæans were said to refer to Luke, but there's no mention of them refering to Mark or John. John is not a synoptic gospel, so including it adds a lot. The same cannot be said of Mark, which has the feel of a synoptic edited to lessen the conflict between Christ and Paul's teachings, or but rather that the teachings come from Paul himself, not Jesus. We can leave it out or score it low.
Is Hebrews Pauline? We think not. Tertullian says it was by Barnabas.
What are the other Ebionite Writings? See RecentCanonAdditions.
Preliminary Canon
[https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=11226](In some kind of rough order):
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Gospel of Matthew ( >= ch. 3 )
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Gospel of Luke ( >= ch. 3 )
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Book of Acts - as history
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The Didache - as a community rule, not as scripture
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Gospel of James (clarifies the Ebionite position on works.)
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The rest of the ACoE letters including Hebrews
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Gospel of Mark (has been edited to lessen the conflict with Paul)
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Gospel of John
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Gospel Of Thomas - from the Nag Hammadi Library 10*. Gospel Of Philip - from the Nag Hammadi Library (tentative) 11*. Gospel Of Truth - from the Nag Hammadi Library (tentative)
Apochrapha: 100. The Western Five including the Book of Revelations 101. Clementine Homilees - not Rufinized, as historical fiction? 102. Letter from Peter To James (preface to the Homilies)
A criteria for the inclusion of works into our Canon is that they refer for doctorine to the Gospel of Matthew, so we can show the interrelatedness quite strongly by putting the cross-references to Matthew in a commentary that goes along with the books in the Canon.
We leave aside the question of translation/version for now and want to think of doing a canon list of books, with an independent commentary so that we can use different translations and base texts. There may be more than one recommended translation, and we think one has to include KJV1611 in the set as a cross-reference.
The opening of Mark really Marcion's?
I'm continuously struck by the degree to which the Gospel of Mark appears to more closely align with the theology of Marcion,
We certainly see Mark as edited with respect to Matthew to edit out the conflicts between itand the Paulines.
JWO Web Pages
JWO Videos
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