Ebion, the fictional heretic

EBION is Stephen Tomkins's favorite heretic:

Ebion, the fictional heretic
The Ebionites, said to follow a non-existent Ebion, remained closer to Jesus's Jewishness than other Christians

Stephen Tomkins
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 June 2010 13.15 BST
Article history
The question: Who's your favourite heretic?

My favourite heretic in Christian history is a man called Ebion. He never existed, but had interesting and revealing reasons for not doing so.

The movement he founded, the Ebionites, did exist. It was one of the earliest Christian heresies – necessarily so because it involved staying closer and truer to the Jewish roots of Christianity, in many ways, than the mainstream church did.

The Ebionites were largely Jewish and remained attached to Jerusalem while the mainstream church spread throughout the Roman Empire. St Irenaeus, the exiled bishop of Lyons and leading polemicist against heresies in the second century, wrote about them that they understood the scriptures "in a peculiar way: they practice circumcision, continue to observe the customs commanded by the law, and in their Jewish way of life even venerate Jerusalem as the house of God".

In other words they were so wilfully misguided as to practice the faith of Jesus and the first Christians, even after the church had reworked it to adapt to the non-Jewish world.

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