THE EBIONITES: THE FIRST CHRISTIANS As Madame Blavatsky and others have shown, the first Christians were undoubtedly the Ebionites and they were Gnostics who followed the Essene-based teachings of the older Nazarene sect, to which Jesus had belonged during his lifetime. The sect of the Nazarenes existed long before Jesus was born and he belonged to them during his lifetime. The oldest texts show that Jesus wasn’t actually known as “Jesus of Nazareth” but as “Jesus the Nazarene,” referring to his belonging to the Nazarenes, which the Apostle Paul later belonged to, hence his being called “a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” in the book of Acts. All the relatives of Jesus belonged to the Ebionites following his death and it is a proven fact that neither the Ebionites nor any other Christian group for the first few centuries of Christianity believed Jesus to have been divine or to have been “God incarnate.” The Ebionites had but one scriptural text, namely the Gospel of Matthew, the original version written in Hebrew, which is known to have been entirely different from the so-called “Gospel of Matthew” which exists in the Christian New Testament today. The Gospel of Matthew which we have today is – in its initial Greek form – largely the product of Saint Jerome in the 4th century A.D. but has also been edited and altered on numerous occasions since then, as has the entire New Testament. The Ebionites, which included Jesus’ own friends and family, rejected all other Gospels and scriptures than their Hebrew Gospel of Matthew as being false (this Hebrew Gospel of Matthew was a highly esoteric text which only a relatively small number of people could comprehend at all, as they had to be initiated into the understanding of it) and maintained that Jesus was neither a Saviour, nor a Redeemer, nor the “Only Son of God” but simply “a good and righteous man only” who they believed taught an important message. Another interesting consideration – this time in regard to early Christian art – is that the very first images of Jesus, which themselves didn’t appear until at least 200 years after his death as the original Christians were strongly against the idea of portraying him, all showed him as clean shaven and holding or using a magic wand to perform his miracles. The later images of the bearded Jesus were based on Greek artwork of Zeus, as an attempt by the Christian Church to attract the pagan masses to the new religion.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 17:43:54 +0000
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