The earliest objection to Paul came from followers of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam (ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him) who kept his law in the generations after him. They knew Paul as the man who had set that law aside, long before any Muslim or Western critic said so.
Church writers of the second to fourth centuries recorded these communities to condemn them as heretics. Their hostile reports are now the best evidence that the first followers of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam refused Paul’s authority from the start.
The Ebionites
The name comes from the Hebrew ʾevyonim (אֶבְיוֹנִים, “the poor”), a word that signaled a life of simplicity and a refusal of worldly power. The Ebionites kept the Torah, including circumcision and the food laws. They held ʿĪsā ibn Maryam to be a messenger of God sent to the Children of Israel, and rejected both his divinity and the doctrine that his death on a cross atoned for sin.
They also rejected Paul. In their tradition he appears as a liar who distorted the teaching of tawḥīd (توحيد, “the oneness of God”) and brought in a religion foreign to the message of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam.1
Where the Ebionites came from was disputed from the start. Epiphanius, who questioned some of them in the fourth century, records that they traced their descent to the church of Jerusalem and their poverty to its sharing of goods; he called them liars and derived their name from a founder called Ebion. Michael Goulder takes their own account: “there never was such a person as Ebion.”2 On his reading the Peter party won the dispute at Antioch, the followers of Paul won in the second century, and the Aramaic churches that kept the law of Jerusalem split away and “became heretical sects, called the Ebionites and the Nazarenes.”3 Their doctrine of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, as Irenaeus reports it, held him to be “a straightforwardly human being,” and gave the cross no significant part in the good news; Goulder reads it as the doctrine of the Jerusalem mission of Peter and James, the teaching Paul opposed.4
The Nazarenes
Church writers such as Epiphanius and Hegesippus describe a second community, the Nazarenes, who also kept the Torah and practiced circumcision. They held that the law remained binding as the mark of obedience to God, against the doctrine of salvation by faith alone.5
A gospel associated with them was known to Jerome and Origen. It later fell out of use as the churches that followed Paul consolidated their hold.
Other dissenting groups
Smaller groups shared the same refusal. According to Hippolytus, the Elkesaites rejected any claim to private revelation of the kind Paul made, and rejected his letters outright.6 The Pseudo-Clementine writings, attributed to Clement of Rome, portray an “enemy” of the law who claims a personal vision, a figure widely read as a veiled attack on Paul.7
Symmachus, whose Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was used by Origen, was himself an Ebionite, according to Eusebius and Jerome.8 The resistance to Paul reached even the scholars of the early church.
A witness preserved in Arabic
In 1966 the scholar Shlomo Pines published an early Arabic source describing a community of the original followers of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam. They kept the Torah, practiced circumcision, avoided pork and prayed facing Jerusalem. They regarded ʿĪsā ibn Maryam as the last prophet of the Children of Israel.
That community condemned Paul as the one who had abolished the law and corrupted the true Gospel. The genuine Gospel, they held, had been written in Hebrew and later altered by his followers to suit Greek and Roman taste.9
The Muslim scholars who later named Paul as the corrupter of the religion of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam were therefore restating, mutatis mutandis, a charge first made by ʿĪsā ibn Maryam’s own followers. The Islamic verdict stands in a line of witnesses that reaches back to Jerusalem.
- John Toland, The Nazarenes (London, 1718), pp. 6, 15–16; A. C. McGiffert, A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), pp. 172, 216; cf. Muhammad ʿAtāʾ ur-Rahīm and Ahmad Thomson, Jesus: Prophet of Islam, revised edition (London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 2002), pp. 76ff. ↩
- Michael Goulder, St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 70, on Epiphanius, Panarion 30.15.4. Goulder presents the Two Missions thesis as his own reading, “not an amalgam of standard opinions,” and as a revival of the proposal Ferdinand Baur made in 1831 (p. 194). ↩
- Ibid., p. 108. ↩
- Ibid., pp. 109–10, on Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.26.1–2. ↩
- Johannes Lehmann, The Jesus Report (New York: Coward-McCann, 1971), pp. 123–128; Toland, op. cit., pp. 73, 76. ↩
- Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, Book 9, esp. 8–10; cf. Epiphanius, Panarion 19.1–5. ↩
- Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.70; Homilies 2.23; cf. F. C. Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ, pp. 28ff. ↩
- Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 54; Origen, Commentary on Matthew 15.14; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.17. ↩
- Shlomo Pines, “The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christianity According to a New Source,” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2 (Jerusalem, 1966), pp. 237ff. ↩
