the limits of variety 195
Paul the Jew regarded faith in Christ as the fulfilment of God’s cov-
enant with Israel. He saw his own mission to the gentiles as a divinely
ordained task akin to that of the prophets, who had themselves foretold
that the nations would worship the God of Israel in the last days. It is
clear from his own account that even his fellow Jews who believed in
Jesus took some persuading of the validity of his ‘gospel for the uncir-
cumcised’. His letters contain much polemic against those who required
gentiles to convert to Judaism as well as faith in Christ in order to
achieve salvation, and his relationship with the Jewish Christian com-
munity in Jerusalem led by Peter and James (see above) was at times
difficult. For those Jews in whose eyes Jesus was just another religious
enthusiast who had come to a sad end through the actions of the Roman
authorities in Judaea, Paul’s mission was irrelevant. The Christians in
the communities he set up did not think of themselves as Jews, and Jews
generally responded by treating gentile Christians as irrelevant to them.
Paul himself lamented the failure of most of his fellow Jews to be
enlightened by his message: ‘Moses ... put a veil over his face to keep
the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being
set aside. But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when
they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there,
since only in Christ is it set aside.’^55
By the end of the first century ce, most Christians were gentile in
origin and saw their faith as distinct from Judaism. But throughout the
second and third centuries ce the doctrines espoused by different groups
professing Christianity were just as varied as those of first- century Juda-
ism. Among these groups were small coteries of Christians who professed
themselves as Jews either because this was their ethnic origin or as a
statement of adherence to the Torah alongside their faith in Jesus as
saviour. Most of what we are told about these Jewish Christians comes
from hostile and unreliable witnesses within what became the main-
stream of the Church. So, for instance, it is from the attacks of
heresiologists such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epiphanius that we
learn about the Ebionites, Jewish Christians who kept the Torah,
rejected the epistles of Paul and believed that Jesus was the human son
of Joseph and Mary, and that the Holy Spirit came on him only when
he was baptized. The Ebionites are said to have flourished in the second
to fourth centuries ce and are sometimes by these ancient sources
located specifically to the east of the River Jordan. Their name comes
probably from the Hebrew evyon, ‘poor’, which may reflect the severe
asceticism they are alleged to have adopted. That they portrayed