Page 121 - Prophet Jesus (Pbuh): A Prophet Not A Son, Of God

HARUN YAHYA 119

Nazareans a heretical sect. One of these, Justin Martyr, in a text written in
150, referred to a sect that recognized Prophet Jesus (pbuh) as a Messiah
but nevertheless regarded him as a man; in other words, not as the son of
God. (Surely God is beyond that!) Justin Martyr further stressed another
matter. These people were criticized by those who believed in the trinity,
and relations between the two sides were irretrievably damaged. 13
Approximately fifty years later, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, pub-

lished a text called Adversus Haereses (Against the Heretics). Heading the
list of the heretics condemned by Irenaeus was a community described as
the Ebionites. The word Ebionites, or Ebionæans (Ebionaioi), is a translit-
eration of an Aramean word meaning poor men. 14
According to Irenaeus, the Ebionites were heretics because they be-
lieved that Prophet Jesus (pbuh) was a normal human being. Moreover,
according to Irenaeus, they still adhered scrupulously to the Mosaic law
15
and accepted only one of the four gospels: the Gospel of Matthew. It ap-
pears from the written sources that the Ebionite community was actually
the Nazareans. Church leaders used the words Ebionite and Nazarean as
synonyms for each other. According to Epiphanius, the heresy of this group
lay in their rejecting the so-called divinity of Prophet Jesus (pbuh) and describ-
ing him as a normal human being. Epiphanius stressed that these people
did not use the New Testament books approved by the Church, but used
other versions of these books. 16
The fact that the Ebionites believed that Prophet Jesus (pbuh) was
human and possessed no divine nature was emphasized in an article,
"The Lost Gospels," published in the 22 December 2003 edition of Time

magazine:
They believed in Christ but saw him, as Ehrman puts it, "as the
Jewish Messiah sent … to the Jewish people in fulfillment of Jewish
Scripture." The Ebionites' Jesus was not a member of an eternal
Trinity. They claimed he was a man whose original distinction was
that he kept the entire Jewish law – with its hundred of command-