Luke 6:20

20. Blessed be ye poor From the fact that Luke in an abbreviated form furnishes a blessing upon the poor, (omitting the phrase in spirit as given by Matthew,) and a woe in Luke 6:24 upon the rich, it has been maintained by some that Luke, if not our Lord himself, belonged to a sect or class of men who held to the intrinsic sin of riches and merit of poverty. A body of heretics, under the name of Ebionites, arose very early in the Christian Church, formed of primitive Jews, who held our Lord to be a mere man, maintained the Jewish ritual, and asserted the great merit of absolute poverty. This sect developed itself early in the second century. Writers like Renan assert that Luke’s Gospel possesses, in passages like this, a strong Ebionitish tinge. But it is well known that Luke was associated intimately with St. Paul, who was the great champion against this very sort of Jewish ultraism, and whose doctrines were the opposite of Ebionitism. If, as we suppose, Luke received a share of the matter of the Peraean gospel from James the Lord’s brother, (see our notice of Luke, p. 2,) resident pastor or bishop of Jerusalem, it is very likely that the passages that seem to bear hard upon the pride of wealth were furnished by him. For, though no Ebionite, James was strongly Judaic and severely ascetic in his tendencies, as his Epistle shows. In the second place, to say that rich men are wicked, especially in a given age, and to say that wealth in itself is a sin, are very different things. It is the tendency indeed of wealth upon the depraved heart of man to produce an oppressive spirit. And there are times when, as a class, the rich are so utterly oppressors that the very term rich acquires a sameness of meaning with the term oppressive; and in such ages piety and rectitude may be so exclusively with the poor that the virtuous may be naturally designated by the term poor. Yet in the days of an Abraham or a Solomon, piety may dwell in the tents of the rich and in the palaces of the noble, while vice and degradation may prevail among the rustics and the rabble. Thus the rich may be in spirit poor, that is, virtuous; and the poor may be rich in feeling, that is, riotous and oppressive. In the days of Herod and of Jesus, though there were noble exceptions, such as Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and probably some in Herod’s household, to be rich and to be wicked were about the same thing. That this fact should appear in the very language of the Gospels is no indication of Ebionite tendencies.