Chapter 9: the Messianic sects of Joshua/Jesus: Nazarenes, Ebionites, Elchasaites

At the confluence of Essenism, Samaritanism and the baptist movement of Dunstan/Dosithea, sects formed in which a certain communality of doctrine and practice didn’t exclude rivalries and struggles for power. Their conjunction, no doubt precipitated by the Zealot insurrection, ended in the consecration of a syncretic messiah invested with the secret name “God saves,” who incarnated the long line of prophets “anointed by Adonai” and persecuted for their untimely revelations.

All distinguished themselves by a rigorous asceticism; scorn for material goods, the body, women, and pleasure; recourse to the purificatory and initiating rite of baptism; the need to found of communities or Ecclesiai (Churches); propagation of a doctrine of the two roads, that of Light and that of Darkness, sometimes pushed to the cosmic opposition between a Good God and a God who created a bad world; and the expectation of a Messiah or, more exactly, his return, because (sent by the Good God) he was pitilessly put to death by the sacerdotes of the Temple of Jerusalem or their henchmen. The redemption promised by the Angel-Messiah would spread his grace to all of humanity, compensating the just and punishing the wicked.

Hostile to the Sadduceans and the Pharisians, these sects accommodated themselves to the philosophical speculations of Philo of Alexandria. His Judaic monotheism actually gave to gnosis a manner of safe-conduct that the supposed Fathers of the Church didn’t fail to use. On the other hand, with a perfect unanimity, they execrated the Great Power of life that the works of Simon of Samaria illustrated.

Nazarenes and Ebionites

Pliny the Elder, recopying reports drafted on the orders of Emperor Augustus by one of his generals, Marcus Agrippa, indicates in Book V of his Natural Histories that not far from Apamea, in Syria, Nazarenes lived in a city called Bambyx, Hierapolis or Mabog.

Marcus Agrippa died in 12 [B.C.E.]; Dubourg situates his investigations between 30 and 20 [B.C.E.]. Accounting for the lapse of time required for the installation in Syria of a sect born in Palestine, Dubourg judges plausible the presence of a Nazarene current around 50 B.C.[169]

In the beginning a priest-warrior consecrating to YHWH an existence of austerity and piety, the nazir thereafter designated a man devoted to God by a vow of “nazireat.” The word suggests a connection with “Nazoreans” or “Nazarenes”: “the observers, the conservers.”

Rallied to the rigorous faction of Judaism, hostile to the Sadduceans and the Pharisians, they inscribed themselves in the general line of Essenism, of which they perhaps formed a community or Church. The Greek authors of the Acts of the Apostles, who compiled and rewrote ancient midrashim so as to reconcile the schools of Simon/Paul and Simon Cephas, put on stage a Jewish orthodoxy that vituperated the hairesis ton nazoraion, the heresy of the Nazarenes.

The Pharisian rabbis knew them under the appelation noisrim and the declared heretics (aher, “others”), not in 90 as is often advanced, but in 135, when — from the revolt of the Messiah Bar Kochba, which they refused to join — there was born the legend of a Joshua/Jesus who was a pacifist and respectful of the Romans.

Bar Kochba stigmatized them in his letters under the name “Galileans.” In the Second Century, Hegesippe thus referred to one of the Jewish sects of his time, but for Emperor Julian (331–363), cited by Cyrille of Alexandria, “Galilean” was still a synonym for “Christian.” Moreover, several texts designated the Messiah Jesus with the word “Galilean.”

Like the other anti-Judean Jewish sects, the Nazarenes did not escape the Zealot embrace. Only their refusal to rally themselves to the troops of Bar Kochba around 133–135 exonerated them from the reproach of violence and haloed them with the pacifism thanks to which the Greco-Roman Christian communities demarked themselves from “Semitic fury.”

Issued from Jewish religious extremism, Nazarenism paradoxically opened the door to an incessant revision of the Mosaic message and law. Their midrashim, which were propagated in the assemblies of believers, prepared the coming of the Messiah that Israel invoked in the heart of the troubles of the war, correcting the prophecies of the past and adapting them to the modernity of the circumstances, forming the streams of the foreseeable torrent that would swell the Good News announced by the Hymns of the Master of Justice.

One would deceive oneself if one were to give Nazarenism a unity that contradicted the echoes of quarrels between the leaders whose names have been preserved: Theudas/Thomas the Egyptian, Jacob, Simon Cephas, John the Essene, Zacchea/Clement, Barnabas, Saul also known as Paul, and Jochanaan also known as John the Baptist.

A sect of the Ebionites, still active in the Fourth Century, certainly derived from these ebbyonim (“poor people”), laid the foundations among the Essenes for voluntary poverty, of which the Messalians, Vaudois, Beghards, Fraticelles and Apostolics would discover the perilous virtues.

The Nazarenes, or at least the tendency that Jochanaan represented as the only prophetic authority, perpetuate themselves to this very day in Mandeism, always alive between the Tigress and Euphrates. Their name means “those who save,” the “Gnostics.” They were also known as “Christians of Saint John” — meaning Jochanaan/John the Baptist. Their late doctrine, clarified by an abundant literature (Ginza or Tresor, subdivided into a Right Ginza and a Left Ginza), formed a syncretism in which were mixed Judeo-Christian, Iranian and Babylonian elements.

The Mandeans claimed for themselves Hibil (Abel), Shitil (Seth), Anosh (Henoch) and John the Baptist, and formed one of the branches of Nazarenism, which, questing for a unique Messiah, rejected the accord established by the partisans of Jacob, Simon/Peter and Saul/Paul under the name Joshua/Jesus, because, according to them, Anosh showed that Jesus was a false prophet.

Elchasaites

In the third year of Trajan’s reign, around 100–101, Nazarenism seemed to give way to a new generation of Christians: the Elchasaites. (The diversity of the names must not confuse us. The “Sampseans,” whom Hegesippe called the “Nasbotheans,” only offered variants of the expression seo ayya, otherwise known as “the Baptists.”) A sacred book was delivered to the prophet Elchasai, chief of a Christian community — which no doubt justified the inquest of Pliny the Younger, the papal legate of Bythinia — by two angels, one male, the Son of God, the other female, the Holy Spirit. The Homelies of Peter counted a number of their writings, at least in their original versions. They also constituted a Christianity different from the opinion that the Catholics of the Fourth Century tried to impose; that is why Epiphanius of Salamis — who was ironic in his Panarion, or the Box of Drugs [when he wrote]: “Not being Christians, nor Jews, nor pagans, but something of an intermediary, at base they are nothing” — showed a contrario that they were Jews, Christians and pioneers of a Greco-Roman Christianity (but the Church would attribute that role to the enemy of the Elchasaites, Saul/Paul, when it snatched him from the hands of his discoverer, Marcion).

Did not Elchasaitism, with its real or mythical prophet — Elchasai is related to the Aramaic word Ieksai, which means “Hidden Savior” — announce the great current of popular Christianity that, under the name New Prophecy, obeyed the Christ reincarnated in the prophet Montan? It isn’t easy to forge a precise opinion on the comings-and-goings of the sects, prophets and apostles when confronted with the ordinary fanaticism of received truth: the ancestors of the Mandeans took exception to Joshua/Jesus; the respective partisans of Jacob and Peter, hostile to Jochanaan also known as John the Baptist, somehow or other accorded themselves so as to thrash the imposture of Saul/Paul, whose disciples held Peter to be a traitor and renegade. The faithful to Jude/Thomas triumphed at Edessa, but without attracting a unanimous veneration, because certain people dressed him in the role of Judas. Add to this the fact that Elchasaitism, which was hostile to Marcion and active in Rome with Alcibiade of Apamea, witnessed the birth of Mani, the future founder of a religion and the clear inspiration for the dogmas of Marcion.[170] Mani, raised in an Elchasaite community, reprized the Samaritan titles “Unique Envoy” and “True Prophet.” The “Unique Envoy” was an old Judeo-Samaritan name for the principal agent of God (“He who is designated the Envoy of God received the Spirit of God,” Isaiah, 61, 6). This was also the status of the Master of Justice and Joshua/Jesus. All the inspired prophets — Elchasai as much as Montan — can claim him. One understands that Catholicism accorded exclusivity to Jesus, the only “True Messiah,” and that it prohibited all competition under the pain of death.