Nazarenes
(Heb.)
The same as the St. John Christians; called the Mend or Sabeans. Those Nazarenes who left Galilee several hundred years ago and settled in Syria, east of Mount Lebanon, call themselves also Galileans ; though they designate Christ “a false Messiah” and recognise only St. John the Baptist, whom they call the “Great Nazar”. The Nabatheans with very little difference adhered to the same belief as the Nazarenes or the Sabeans. More than this— the Ebionites, whom Renan shows as numbering among their sect all the surviving relatives of Jesus, seem to have been followers of the same sect if we have to believe St. Jerome, who writes: “ I received permission from the Nazaræans who at Beræa of Syria used this (Gospel of Matthew written in Hebrew) to translate it.... The Evangel which the Nazarenes and Ebionites use which recently I translated from Hebrew into Greek.’ (Hieronymus’ Comment. to Matthew, Book II., chapter xii., and Hieronymus’ De Viris Illust. cap 3.) Now this supposed Evangel of Matthew, by whomsoever written, “exhibited matter”, as Jerome complains (bc. cit.), “not for edification but for destruction”(of Christianity). But the fact that the Ebionites, the genuine primitive Christians, “rejecting the rest of the apostolic writings, made use only of this (Matthew’s Hebrew) Gospel” (Adv. Hær., i. 26) is very suggestive. For, as Epiphanius declares, the Ebionites firmly believed, with the Nazarenes, that Jesus was but a man “of the seed of a man” (Epiph. Contra Ebionites). Moreover we know from the Codex of the Nazarenes, of which the “Evangel according to Matthew” formed a portion, that these Gnostics, whether Galilean, Nazarene or Gentile, call Jesus, in their hatred of astrolatry, in their Codex Naboo‐ Meschiha or “ Mercury”. (See “ Mendæans”). This does not shew much orthodox Christianity either in the Nazarenes or the Ebionites; but seems to prove on the contrary that the Christianity of the early centuries and modern Christian theology are two entirely opposite things (TG).
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Shortly: The same as the St. John Christians; called the Mend or Sabeans. Those Nazarenes who left Galilee se...