First Unitarian Universalist Church of Milford, Massachusetts

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What would it mean to you if you discovered that Christianity was one big mistake? How would you react if you came across convincing arguments that the Christian church today rests on a false foundation? What if the primary teaching of Jesus had been perverted by Christians until the resulting church no longer resembled it’s origins? Would it make any difference to you to think that the spiritual path Jesus followed is no longer reflected in Christian teachings?

There is ample evidence from history that the Christianity we know today could have taken on a wholly different shape, had one or another of the competing interpretations of Jesus’ life and work won the war for dominance in Christian theology. While it’s impossible to predict what shape that ‘other Christianity’ would assume; it’s clear that it would have been dynamically opposed to much of what Christianity has become.

The struggle in Christianity has always been to create the community Jesus would have created, had he lived long enough to guide a community of followers as they became a viable religious organization. Christians, therefore, find themselves struggling not only to understand the words of Jesus and their implications for a community of believers; but, they also find themselves trying to recreate Jesus’ life and personal philosophy to better buttress their understanding of what Jesus would have wanted his followers to do and believe.

The gospel narratives that are in circulation today (that is, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) reveal only limited information in regard to what Jesus taught; and give even less information about what Jesus did. The Jesus of the gospels doesn’t have a well-rounded life. He seems only to travel from village to village, engaging in dialogue and debate with anyone who will listen. The gospel writers change the order of events in Jesus’ life in response to a multitude of external pressures so there isn’t even a clear itinerary that emerges for the last three years of his life. Moreover, the gospels only give us the briefest details about Jesus before the age of thirty; most of which we rehearse each year on Christmas Eve.

The sketchy details that are offered about the words and intentions of Jesus have been completely taken over by the needs of those building communities in his absence. The Christian church tends to proceed as if there was one clear path from the living Jesus to the emerging church. Divergence from that imaginary path was and is labeled heresy, and as we’ve learned time and again, heretics are often dealt with most severely in hopes of eliminating their contaminated doctrines.

History reveals that even ten or twenty years after Jesus’ death widely divergent understandings of his life and work were emerging. Those interpretations formed the foundation for believers groups very different from the one that finally emerged from the fray sometime in the fourth century.

The Gnostics represent one branch of Christian interpretation that was eventually stifled. The Gnostic belief system was dualist, separating the world into flesh and spirit. Although this tendency exists in Christianity today, where the flesh is presumed to be weak and the spirit is presumed to be pure, and more closely resembling God, the Gnostics made a more distinct demarcation between flesh and spirit. They believed that our lives as fleshly beings are the result of a fall from our natural state as spiritual beings. This world we call the created order is not good, but is rife with evil, it was not created by God, but by lesser, tainted beings. (Some Gnostics, it appears, divided God into two parts; the Jewish God who created a flawed world of flesh, and the Christian God who offers redemption from the flesh.# )   In any event, the Gnostic seeks that special knowledge (the Greek word for knowledge is gnosis) which will liberate one who gains that knowledge from this world, and effect a return to the original spiritual state.#

Had the Gnostic Christians won the battle for Christianity, our view of Jesus, and our perception of church community would be dominated by the quest for spiritual truths. Even in the first three centuries after his death, the Jesus depicted by Gnostics was becoming more like a spiritual wisdom figure, and less like a human being. That church likely would have taken less interest in the world as it is; and urged followers to abandon material gains while seeking reintegration with the spiritual world.

Another group of believers who appear to have offered their alternative interpretations well into the third century is the Ebionites. The philosophy they professed is revealed in their name. Ebion is a word meaning ‘poor’, and the Ebionites adopted the simple lifestyle they understood themselves to have inherited from Jesus.   They held a complex core of beliefs about the man and his spiritual message, which would have spawned a church much different than the one, we know today.

    - They were small-u-unitarians; believing that Jesus was human, and God alone was God. Their insistence on the humanity of Jesus separated them from other followers, even in the years immediately after Jesus’ death.

    - They rejected Paul and his teachings, finding him an apostate from the Mosaic Law, to which they adhered, as they believed Jesus did. They looked back at the Jewish scriptures and identified errors, which they believed, had found their way into the texts, while maintaining their allegiance to the teachings of Moses.

    - They believed that Jesus was a vegetarian, who sought to abolish the temple sacrifice of animals, offering instead baptism as a means for repentance. Right living, they believed, depended on vegetarian eating, and they also prohibited the consumption of alcohol, using water in their version of communion ritual.

    - They lived up to their name, which might be translated ‘the poor ones,’ and drew their model from the followers of Jesus who pooled their resources, not long after Jesus died.

    - They rejected warfare, and embraced pacifism as a tenet of Jesus’ faith.


These beliefs describe the beginnings of a church that would not likely resemble the modern Christian church at all. The theological perspectives that won out:

    - created a Christianity that depended on a triune God. The doctrine of the Trinity became more and more important as a defining article of faith for Christianity, and it remains intact today; bringing most Christians to elevate Jesus as God, sharing qualities such as pre-existence and omniscience with God.

    - created a Christianity that took Paul into it’s bosom. The Epistles of Paul make up a significant portion of the New Testament, and his teachings about Christian meanings and mysteries are often those, which shape modern beliefs.

    -   created a Christianity that was more open to gentiles than to Jews. Paul’s teachings emphasized that Jesus, in his death and resurrection, supplanted the Mosiac Law, and that the gentiles coming into the Christian fold did not have to obey it’s dictates. Eventually, circumcision, and the purity laws, as well animal sacrifice, were stripped away from requirements placed before gentile Christians.

    - created a Christianity that eschewed animal sacrifice, but offers no consistent guidance on what to eat and drink. The practice of animal sacrifice became a moot point after the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem in 70 A.D. but there have been only a few Christian groups that embrace vegetarianism as a matter of faith and ethics. If Jesus was a vegetarian that fact is not even retained in the gospel records, which show him enjoying a Passover meal where lamb would have been served. The gospels in use today show Jesus turning water into wine for the enjoyment of wedding guests, and presumably drinking wine as a part of a traditional Passover meal.

    - created a Christianity that often offers an excuse for violence. The need to defend Christian beliefs, and the Christian way of life is today offered as a reason to go to war; or to bring aggressive force against others. The gospel passages which show Jesus’ opposition to violence are simply ignored by many modern Christians.

    There are those, and Keith Akers, the author of The Lost Religion of Jesus, is among them - who believe that the Ebionites captured a more accurate picture of the ‘real’ Jesus, and the requirements he would ask of his followers, than the dominant Christian church. While some of this assertion can be demonstrated from the four gospels themselves; others seem not to be supported at all. The Ebionites appear to have used the Gospel of Matthew (or some variation of it), which tradition says was available in Hebrew. But, they had their own gospel as well, which comes to us only in fragments as a part of arguments against Ebionite beliefs.

That Unitarianism as we know it arose in Europe and in nineteenth century America is a testament to the fact that the unity of God can be supported by the sayings of Jesus. Modern Unitarians have often cited the fact that Jesus seems to have referred to himself only as the Son of Man (and not the Son of God) as proof that Jesus didn’t think of himself as a member of a divine trinity. Unitarians assume that the references to Jesus as the Son of God that appear in the New Testament were inserted into the gospels by the authors, and do not reflect the original words of Jesus. The Ebionites tradition underscores this humanity of Jesus at the moment Jesus is baptized by John. As Jesus arises from the water, the Ebionite gospel reports ‘the heavens were opened, and...a voice from heaven saying: Thou art my beloved son, in thee I am well pleased, and again: This day have I begotten thee.’ The additional line, “This day have I begotten thee.” makes it clear that Jesus was not pre-existent as a part of a divine trinity; but, anointed as were the prophets in ancient days.

Demonstrating that Jesus was a vegetarian is rather more difficult, when one looks at the records from today’s Christian church. I’ve already cited the fact that the gospel accounts place Jesus at a Passover supper at which it is presumed sacrificial lamb would be served. If the gospel authors had any concerns about portraying Jesus accurately as a vegetarian they would have found some way to insert this into the story of the Passover meal. It was however the Ebionites concern to so portray Jesus and they did include in their gospel an exchange where Jesus asks, “Do I desire with desire at this Passover to eat flesh with you?” The presupposed answer to this question is, of course, “No.”

The Ebionites had to use their own gospel to find a saying showing that Jesus came to abolish the practice of animal sacrifice. In their text, he says, “I am come to do away with sacrifices, and if you cease not sacrificing, the wrath of God will not cease from you.”# Akers points out that the diatribes against sacrifices are also found in the writings of the great prophets of Judaism; and he supposes that Jesus and the Ebionites are extending a threat opposed to sacrifice from that period.

The gospels report that Jesus had little good to say about wealth. When he called the disciples he asked them to give up their all to follow him. When the rich man asked about getting into the kingdom of heaven, Jesus told him to give away all that he had and to follow his teachings. He said, ‘it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven.’ The Ebionites who took poverty on themselves were following a line of reasoning well evident in the sayings of Jesus. Noting that the dominant strain of Christianity reserves poverty for only some adherents, Keith Akers notes that new belief systems are found to spread most readily among the upper classes and he suggests that this may, indeed, explain why the call to give up wealth atrophied in the growing Christian traditions.

Again, there is ample evidence, even in the gospels of the dominant Christian church, that Jesus issued a call to peace not war. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God,”# Jesus teaches. Or, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil.”#   Again, Jesus is reported to have said, “...I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”# And, in Matthew’s gospel when one of Jesus’ followers rises to defend him with violence he is given to say, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”#

This Jesus - the pacifist; who calls men and women to live simple lives marked not by wealth, but, by poverty; who rejects all forms of violence including animal sacrifice and eating flesh; the Jew who accepts the law of Moses; the man who seeks a path to repentance and who uses baptism as a symbol of the repenting and purifying heart....this Jesus is glimpsed in the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. His words are sometimes, in some places in the Christian community, quoted to support a call to pacifism, or simplicity, or devotion to the ways of the divine; yet the complex of these beliefs has not in two thousand years dominated the formation of Christian beliefs or the religion itself.

How might Christianity be different, if the Ebionite view had taken control of Christianity? Would that thing we know as Christianity have faded from history, as the Ebionites have, if their view dominated? Are there sociological and psychological pressures that make it impossible for people, in any era of history, to look to this Jesus as a model for living and spiritual development?

The existence of the Ebionites in the early days of the developing Christian church brings these questions into sharper relief. Thinking that this was a living option and it was so thoroughly rejected makes me wonder again about human beings and what we all want from our lives. It makes me wonder if the excesses of Christianity in wealth, and war, and violence against all creatures could ever be curbed. It makes me wonder about our individual relationships to the story of Jesus, both the Jesus of the Ebionites, and the Jesus of the Christian community. What difference, does it make for us and in us, to know that there were some who followed a very different Jesus; who held out their perceptions for others to examine for a couple of hundred years; but, tides of theology overwhelmed the gospel of simplicity; and now have nearly consumed it? What difference can the gospel of simplicity make in our lives?