Ebionites in the context of "Jewish Christianity"

In Christian theology, the incarnation is the belief that the pre-existent divine person of Jesus Christ, God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, who is also the Logos (Koine Greek for 'word'), was "made flesh" by being conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of a woman, the Virgin Mary, who is also known as the Theotokos (Greek for "God-bearer" or "Mother of God"). The doctrine of the incarnation then entails that Jesus was at the same time both fully God and fully human.

In the incarnation, as traditionally defined by those Churches that adhere to the Council of Chalcedon, the divine nature of the Son was united but not mixed with human nature in one divine person, Jesus, or according to those adhering to the Council of Ephesus, the divine and human natures of Christ are fully united into one composite nature "without mixing, confusion, or separation". This is central to the traditional faith held by most Christians. Alternative views on the subject (see Ebionites and the Gospel of the Hebrews) have been proposed throughout the centuries, but all were rejected by Nicene Christianity.

In Christianity, God is the eternal, supreme being who created and preserves all things. Christians believe in a monotheistic conception of God, which is both transcendent (wholly independent of, and removed from, the material universe) and immanent (involved in the material universe). Christians believe in a singular God that exists in a Trinity, which consists of three Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Christian teachings on the transcendence, immanence, and involvement of God in the world and his love for humanity exclude the belief that God is of the same substance as the created universe (rejection of pantheism) but accept that God the Son assumed hypostatically united human nature, thus becoming man in a unique event known as "the Incarnation".

Early Christian views of God were expressed in the Pauline epistles and the early Christian creeds, which proclaimed one God and the divinity of Jesus. Although some early sects of Christianity, such as the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, protested against the deification of Jesus, the concept of Jesus being one with God was accepted by the majority of Gentile Christians. This formed one aspect of the split of early Christianity and Judaism, as Gentile Christian views of God began to diverge from the traditional Jewish teachings of the time.

The Gospel of the Ebionites is the conventional name given by scholars to an apocryphal gospel extant only as seven brief quotations in a heresiology known as the Panarion, by Epiphanius of Salamis; he misidentified it as the "Hebrew" gospel, believing it to be a truncated and modified version of the Gospel of Matthew. The quotations were embedded in a polemic to point out inconsistencies in the beliefs and practices of a Jewish Christian sect known as the Ebionites relative to Nicene orthodoxy.

The surviving fragments derive from a gospel harmony of the Synoptic Gospels, composed in Greek with various expansions and abridgments reflecting the theology of the writer. Distinctive features include the absence of the virgin birth and of the genealogy of Jesus; an Adoptionist Christology, in which Jesus is chosen to be God's Son at the time of his Baptism; the abolition of the Jewish sacrifices by Jesus; and an advocacy of vegetarianism.