patristic testimonies reconsidered polis. He was the head of that monastery for about thirty years until
he was elected the bishop of Salamis in Cyprus in . About ten years
later, he completed a major work on heresies, thePanarion, in which he
describes and confutes eighty Jewish and Christian heresies. The name
of the work,Medicine Chestin English, characterizes its main intent:
In Epiphanius’ view, the heresies represented poisonous doctrines that
threatened the Christians of his day, and his intention was to provide the
antidotes.
Although Epiphanius may have believed that there once was a person
called Ebion, who founded the “heresy” of the Ebionites, modern schol-
ars generally agree that the person is fictive. Ebion was introduced by
Tertullian and Hippolytus but, by Epiphanius’ time, his existence seems
to have been taken for granted. Because heresies were usually thought to
have been introduced by actual persons, the genesis of the Ebionites was
made to conform by being traced back to the activity of a person called
Ebion.
Epiphanius’ description and refutation of the Ebionites (Panarion
) is the richest ancient source on the Ebionites available. Together
with the passage on the Nazarenes (Panarion), it amounts to a full-
blown history of the Jewish-Christian “heresy” from the times of the
early Jerusalem community to Epiphanius’ day. Earlier heresiologists had
described the heresies of Cerinthus^10 and the Ebionites successively, but
Epiphanius placed the Nazarenes between these two, claiming that Ebion
whom he identifies as the originator of the Ebionite heresy, was originally
one of the Nazarenes. As we shall see below, this whole history mainly
serves Epiphanius’ polemical interests and has little or nothing to do with
theactualcourseofevents.
In thePanarion, Epiphanius was able to use all the information pro-
vided by his predecessors, especially by Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Origen
and Eusebius. In addition, he had some knowledge about Ebionites who
were his contemporaries, and was able to quote passages from their lit-
erature.^11 Epiphanius presents quotations from a gospel they used, and
(^10) Scholars have debated whether the historical Cerinthus was a Gnostic or a Jewish-
Christian teacher. Irenaeus’ heresiology (Haer. ..) depicts him more like a Gnostic
but Epiphanius (Pan. ) counts him among the conservative Jewish Christians who
opposed Paul. For discussion, see above and Myllykoski .
(^11) When Epiphanius lists the dwelling places of the Ebionites, he also remarks that
there are Ebionites in Cyprus where he himself was bishop (Pan. ..–; ..). The
Ebionite literature he used was probably derived from them.