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Ebionites as a term refers to a Jewish Christian sect, which viewed poverty as a blessing, that existed during the early centuries of the Common Era. The Ebionites embraced an adoptionist Christology, thus understanding Jesus of Nazareth as a mere man who, by virtue of his righteousness in following the Law of Moses, was chosen by God to be the messianic "prophet like Moses". A majority of the Ebionites rejected as heresies the orthodox Christian beliefs in Jesus' divinity, virgin birth and substitutionary atonement that were accepted by the early Church; and therefore maintained that Jesus was born the natural son of Joseph and Mary, sought to abolish animal sacrifices by prophetic proclamation, and died as a martyr in order to move all Israel to repentance.
According to the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, and Theodoret's Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium, the Borborites or Borborians were a Christian Gnostic sect, said to be descended from the Nicolaitans. It is difficult to know for sure the practices of the group, as both Epiphanius and Theodoret were opponents of the group. According to Epiphanius, the sect were libertines who embraced the pleasures of the earthly world.
Epiphanius of Salamis was the bishop of Salamis, Cyprus, at the end of the 4th century. He is considered a saint and a Church Father by both the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches. He gained a reputation as a strong defender of orthodoxy. He is best known for composing the Panarion, a compendium of eighty heresies, which included also pagan religions and philosophical systems. According to Ernst Kitzinger, he "seems to have been the first cleric to have taken up the matter of Christian religious images as a major issue", and there has been much controversy over how many of the quotations attributed to him by the Byzantine Iconoclasts were actually by him. Regardless of this he was clearly strongly against some contemporary uses of images in the church.
The Nazarenes were an early Jewish Christian sect in first-century Judaism. The first use of the term is found in the Acts of the Apostles of the New Testament, where Paul the Apostle is accused of being a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes before the Roman procurator Antonius Felix at Caesarea Maritima by Tertullus. At that time, the term simply designated followers of Jesus of Nazareth, as the Hebrew term נוֹצְרִי, and the Arabic term نَصْرَانِي, still do. נוֹצְרִים (Nazarenes) can also be found in 2 Kings 17:9 and 18:8, in the Hebrew, but usually gets translated as, "watchtower" or "watchmen." The "tower of the Nazarenes" is described as the northern boundary in, 2 Kings 18:8.
The Alogi (ἄλογοι), also called Alogoi or Alogians, were a group of heterodox Christians in Asia Minor that flourished c. 200 CE, and taught that the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse of John were not the work of the Apostle, but his adversary Cerinthus. What we know of them is derived from their doctrinal opponents, whose literature is extant, particularly Epiphanius of Salamis. It was Epiphanius who coined the name "Alogi" as a word play suggesting that they were both illogical and they were against the Christian doctrine of the Logos. While Epiphanius does not specifically indicate the name of its founder, Dionysius Bar-Salibi, citing a lost work of Hippolytus, writes in his commentary on the Apocalypse,
Hippolytus of Rome says: A man appeared, named Caius, saying that the Gospel is not by John, nor the Apocalypse but that it is by Cerinthus the heretic.
The Gospel of the Ebionites is the conventional name given by scholars to an apocryphal gospel extant only as seven brief quotations in a heresiology known as the Panarion, by Epiphanius of Salamis; he misidentified it as the "Hebrew" gospel, believing it to be a truncated and modified version of the Gospel of Matthew. The quotations were embedded in a polemic to point out inconsistencies in the beliefs and practices of a Jewish Christian sect known as the Ebionites relative to Nicene orthodoxy.
The Audians or Anthropomorphites were a sect of Christians in the fourth century in Syria and Scythia, named after their founder Audius, who took literally the text of I Tim. 3, 16 — that God created mankind in his own image.
Collyridianism was an alleged Early Christian movement in Arabia whose adherents apparently worshipped the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus as a goddess. The existence of the sect is subject to some dispute by scholars, as the only contemporary source to describe it is the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, published in approximately 376 AD.
The Antidicomarians or Antidicomarianites, also called Dimoerites, were a Christian sect active from the 3rd to the 5th century. Their name was invented by an opponent, Epiphanius of Salamis, who described them as heretical in his Panarion. The existence of the Antidicomarians as an organized sect may be doubted, as it is attested only in Epiphanius, but the doctrines he attributes to them were certainly matters of live debate in the late 4th century.
The Archontics, or Archontici, were a Gnostic sect that existed in Palestine, Syria and Armenia, who arose towards the mid 4th century CE. They were thus called from the Greek word ἄρχοντες, "principalities", or "rulers", by reason that they held the world to have been created and ruled by malevolent Archons.
Jude is one of the brothers of Jesus (Greek: ἀδελφοί, romanized: adelphoi, lit. 'brethren') according to the New Testament. He is traditionally identified as the author of the Epistle of Jude, a short epistle which is reckoned among the seven general epistles of the New Testament—placed after Paul's epistles and before the Book of Revelation—and considered canonical by Christians. Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians believe this Jude is the same person as Jude the Apostle; Catholics hold that Jude was a cousin, but not literally a brother of Jesus, while the Eastern Orthodox hold that Jude is St. Joseph’s son from a previous marriage.
In early Christian heresiology, the Panarion, to which 16th-century Latin translations gave the name Adversus Haereses, is the most important of the works of Epiphanius of Salamis. It was written in Koine Greek beginning in 374 or 375, and issued about three years later, as a treatise on heresies, with its title referring to the text as a "stock of remedies to offset the poisons of heresy." It treats 80 religious sects, either organized groups or philosophies, from the time of Adam to the latter part of the fourth century, detailing their histories, and rebutting their beliefs. The Panarion is an important source of information on the Jewish–Christian gospels, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Hebrews.
The Elcesaites, Elkasaites, Elkesaites or Elchasaites were an ancient Jewish Christian sect in Lower Mesopotamia, then the province of Asoristan in the Sasanian Empire that was active between 100 and 400 CE. The members of this sect, which originated in the Transjordan, performed frequent baptisms for purification and had a Gnostic orientation.
The Valesians were a Christian sect that advocated self-castration. The sect was founded by Valens, an Arabian philosopher who established the sect sometime in the second century AD. They were notorious for forcibly castrating travelers whom they encountered and guests who visited them.
Prisca, often written in the diminutive form Priscilla, was a 2nd-century A.D. foundational leader and prophet of the religious movement known today as Montanism based in the Phrygian towns of Pepuza and Tymion. She, along with the prophets Montanus and Maximilla, proselytized a form of Christianity in which the Holy Spirit would enter the human body and speak through it.
Justus II of Jerusalem was a 2nd-century Jewish Christian bishop of Jerusalem.
Levis of Jerusalem was a 2nd-century Jewish Christian bishop of Jerusalem.
The Tascodrugites were a sect active in Galatia in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, and possibly as late as the ninth. Ancient sources present them variously as Gnostics or heterodox Christians. Most likely they were Montanists.
Quintilla was a Phrygian Christian prophetess within the movement known as Montanism. The sect of the Quintillians was named after her.
References
- ↑ Blunt, John Henry (2003). Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, Ecclesiastical Parties and Schools of Religious Thought. Kessinger Publishing. p. 43. ISBN 0-7661-3005-3 . Retrieved 2008-08-09.
- 1 2 Alphandéry, Paul Daniel (1911). . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 2 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 204.
- ↑ The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Books II and III, trans. Frank Williams (Leiden: Brill, 1993), p. 114
- ↑ Panarion, p. 115
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