Did Ebionites Use Water as a Sacrament?

 

The central sacrament of Christians is an innovation overlaid upon the biblical feast day of Passover. Another is Immersion (baptism), and these two common to all Christians in whatever form or ceremony they take. These two are taken to be sacraments actually taught by Yeshua to be kept by all Christians and had great importance from the very beginning of Christianity.

But we are not Christians just as the first Ebionites were not.

The Ebionites did not hold Yeshua to be divine, nor did they or would they, as observant Jews, hold his blood to be a sacrament (even symbolically with wine)  since he was not a divine savior. Imbibing a god in order to have communion with him is found in several religions, including the Mithraism which competed with Christianity for centuries to gain converts.

Yet there is one sacrament, or act to set oneself apart to God in some manner, Christians and Ebionites share, and that is the symbolic act of immersion signifying a purification. Such immersion was performed in order to enter the Temple precincts as practiced by Jews. But John (Yahhanan bar Zekaryah) began to feature an innovation in his preaching for repentance of Jews. His immersion was for a purification away from the precincts of the Temple as if God's Presence should be acknowledged everywhere at all times, and this purification in living waters (like streams and rivers) symbolized a consciousness a person entered into on his commitment to repentance. It became an initiatory rite, unattached to the ritual purifications that Jews undertook in the Temple environs. It was the first sacrament first entered into by the followers of John's repentance/ reformation movement and Yeshua partook of this sacrament himself. Later the gentile followers of Paul and the Christian Church in general retained this sacrament because it imitated the act of Yeshua.

So the followers of John and Yeshua were entering into immersion even before Yeshua's death. They also, as Jews, observed the Passover but did not re-interpret it as a pagan communion. Why would anyone drink the blood of someone, especially if it were the blood of a common man who was not a god or a savior--even if doing that could somehow make sense theologically.

It did make sense to pagans who entered the Christian ranks.

Some histories of Ebionites make the claim that Ebionites drank water on passover. They gather this from an account in Irenaeus' Adversus Haereses:

 

5.1.3. Vain also are the Ebionites, who do not receive by faith into their soul the union of God and man, but who remain in the old leaven of [the natural] birth, and who do not choose to understand that the Holy Ghost came upon Mary, and the power of the Most High did overshadow her: wherefore also what was generated is a holy thing, and the Son of the Most High God the Father of all, who effected the incarnation of this being, and showed forth a new [kind of] generation; that as by the former generation we inherited death, so by this new generation we might inherit life.

Therefore do these men reject the commixture of the heavenly wine, and wish it to be water of the world only, not receiving God so as to have union with Him, but they remain in that Adam who had been conquered and was expelled from Paradise: not considering that as, at the beginning of our formation in Adam, that breath of life which proceeded from God, having been united to what had been fashioned, animated the man, and manifested him as a being endowed with reason; so also, in [the times of] the end, the Word of the Father and the Spirit of God, having become united with the ancient substance of Adam’s formation, rendered man living and perfect, receptive of the perfect Father, in order that as in the natural [Adam] we all were dead, so in the spiritual we may all be made alive. For never at any time did Adam escape the harms of God, to whom the Father speaking, said, "Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness." And for this reason in the last times (fine), not by the will of the flesh, nor by the will of man, but by the good pleasure of the Father, His hands formed a living man, in order that Adam might be created [again] after the image and likeness of God.

 

Irenaeus admits that the Ebionites reject the divinity of Yeshua, and say they cannot "receive faith into their soul the union of God and man." In other words, the Ebionites reject the idea of communion, the idea that communion is the union of God and the man Yeshua or that they can receive "faith" in that manner, drinking something or eating something for that matter.

Christians know that wine is not the only element of Christian communion to "receive Christ" but that bread is as important making up "the body of Christ" in conjunction with wine as the "blood of Christ." Did the Ebionites do a "half communion" eating only the bread? Would this not be a notable thing for Irenaeus to mention. (In fact, Passover is not even mentioned.) But Irenaeus uses imagery and theological explanations under girding the idea of communion. 

In fact, they are rejecting the idea of communion altogether. Their action amounts to "not receiving God so as to have union with Him." So there is no communion for the Ebionites. From a Jewish standpoint, Ebionites as Jews could not ever justifiy such an act. Jews of other sects would have seized upon this bizarre (and alleged) practice of drinking water as a sacrament, especially on Passover. Other groups are known for their daily baptizing, and the importance of water and /or ritual bathing as initiatory rites. Today the Mandaeans of Iraq and elsewhere, who claim to be followers of John, still ritually bathe. Under Gnosticism baptism has developed its own body of myth as communion has in the West.    

The Ebionites wish their sacrament to be only "water of the world." A sacrament of water? The Ebionites were not drinking water for Passover, or pretending it was blood or flesh of Yeshua. They were immersing themselves as sacred action just as John and then Yeshua taught baptism.

Later Epiphanius, the confused, repeats Irenaeus' language without understanding its meaning. We cannot accuse Irenaeus of misreporting the Ebionite practice. He doesn't say they used water in their alleged communion. It is later Christians whose mindset provides the context and creates the myth of communion-keeping, water drinking Ebionites.

For Ebionites today, immersion is still the main sacrament of initiation except for converts who undergo circumcision. There is no communion that exists in Ebionitism other than joining in partnership with God through Covenant of Torah, just as found among other Jews. Immersion as a initiatory act is also found in typical Judaism for converts. It is not a magic act but a symbolic acceptance of the yoke of Heaven through God's commandments and the cleansing of old ways and associations. This is what Irenaeus means when he speaks of "old leaven" commonly referring to Judaism and the Ebionites' continued attachment to Judaism.