King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics)
“She asked him no questions and he told her little of what had happened to him in Egypt. He learned from her that his brother Jose was prospering in trade at near-by Bethlehem ; but that James, grown more and more pious, had taken vows and gone to join an ascetic society in Lower Transjordania, called Ebionites or “the poor men”. The Ebionites were an off-shoot of the Essenes, from whom they differed chiefly in their abstention from the study of astrology, in never cutting their hair or drinking... wine, and in not cloistering themselves in a compound. Their self-imposed task was calling the people to repentance and praying for them. They abominated blood-sacrifices and kept the Passover in the old style, as a festival of the barley-harvest, rejecting as spurious the passage in the Book of Exodus which orders the Paschal lamb to be ritually eaten at Jerusalem every year by all pious Jewish households. This was only one of many passages in the Books of Moses which they rejected : they accepted, for example, only a few verses of Deuteronomy, the book first published in the reign of Good King Josiah, which gave a pretended antiquity and divine sanction to current Temple practices.MoreLess
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