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>The Evolution of the Virgin Birth Narrative in the Gospel of Matthew
>If the author of Matthew admits that Jesus was born a memzer, why would the same author also claim that Mary was a virgin? One could argue the fictional virginity was meant to be taken as symbolic. But I think the answer to that question is that it was not the same author. The Gospel of Matthew was known to have been used by two other “heretical” Jewish sects dedicated to Jesus: the Ebionites and Cerinthians. The Ebionites, a name that means “the poor ones”, continued to follow the laws of Moses from the Hebrew Torah and revered James the Just, which the Epistle to the Galatians calls the “brother of the Lord”. Many Biblical scholars, including Tabor, as well as Jewish scholars like Robert Eisenman and Hyam Maccoby, believe that the Ebionites represented an earlier form of Jewish Christianity that followed the ideas not only of Jesus but also John the Baptist and Jesus' brother James and that the Ebionites were against Paul and the Greek Hellenistic reforms to Christianity, such as adding a bread and wine Eucharist symbolizing the body and blood of a dying-and-rising god, which the scholars of this camp usually attribute to him. The Ebionites also believed in an Adoptionist Christology, meaning they believed that Jesus had been born to two parents but that he became unified with Christ when he was “adopted” by the Holy Spirit at his baptism, and this Christ spirit left him just before he died. This belief was reflected in their version of the Gospel of Matthew being much closer to its primary source, the Gospel of Mark, in that it contained neither the genealogy nor the virgin birth narrative
