chapterone
irrelevant for the study of early Jewish Christianity. On the contrary,
the New Testament is our best source for the earliest Jewish Christian-
ity. However, during the past decades, there has been an extensive re-
evaluation of the Jewish and Jewish-Christian character of most of the
New Testament writings and I see no reason to recapitulate this discus-
sion in this volume.^14 Instead, my intention is to update the discussion of
the non-canonical sources for the earliest Jewish Christianity since this
has not received so much attention.
My goal is twofold. On the one hand, my intention is to provide
a critical assessment of the hypothesis—often presented by those who
have focused on non-canonical sources of Jewish Christianity—that the
fragments of Jewish-Christian gospels contain old traditions even dating
back to pre-synoptic times. On the other hand, the goal is to see how
traditions about Jewish Christians developed and how Jewish Christians
themselves developed their traditions after the completion of the writings
that are now contained in the canonical New Testament.
Although one of the main intentions of Chapter is to discuss the
Jewish-Christian profile of the Ebionites and the Nazarenes from the sec-
ond century onwards, it will become clear in the course of the discussion
that I find the Ebionites better candidates for being the successors of the
Jerusalem community than the Nazarenes. In fact, I show in Chapter
that the distinctive sect of the Nazarenes was Epiphanius’ own inven-
tion, a stereotyped picture of the earliest form of the Jewish-Christian
heresy, which he developed on the basis of the literary sources available
to him: Acts of the Apostles and Eusebius’Ecclesiastical History.Jerome
also speaks of the Nazarenes but his references are best understood as
reflecting the fact that “Nazarenes” was a common name for Christians
in the Syriac language. Because Epiphanius’ description of the Ebionites
is closely tied with the Pseudo-Clementine sources and a religious move-
ment known as the Elchasites, Chapter also includes a short discussion
of these movements and their relation to the Ebionites.
In Chapter , I argue for a theory that assumes only two Jewish-
Christian apocryphal gospels: theGospel of the Ebionitesand theGospel
of the Hebrews. However, the theory deviates from the previous hypothe-
ses that have assumed only two gospels because, in my view, the evi-
dence indicates that, in addition to two actual gospels, there was also
(^14) My own contribution to this discussion has taken place especially within Matthean
studies. See Luomanen ; Luomanen b.