We find, moreover, Epiphanius, the Christian Homer of _The Heresies_, telling us that “Ebion had the opinion of the Nazarenes, the form of the Cerinthians (who fable that the world was put together by angels), and the appellation of Christians.”[306] An appellation certainly more correctly applied to them than to the orthodox (so-called) Christians of the school of Irenæus and the later Vatican. Renan shows the Ebionites numbering among their sect all the surviving relatives of Jesus. John the Baptist, his cousin and _precursor_, was the accepted Saviour of the Nazarenes, and their prophet. His disciples dwelt on the other side of the Jordan, and the scene of the baptism of the Jordan is clearly and beyond any question proved by the author of _Sod, the Son of the Man_, to have been the site of the Adonis-worship.[307] “Over the Jordan and beyond the lake dwelt the Nazarenes, a sect said to have existed already at the birth of Jesus, and to have counted him among its number. They must have extended along the east of the Jordan, and southeasterly among the Arabians (_Galat._ i. 17, 21; ii. 11), and Sabæans in the direction of Bosra; and again, they must have gone far north over the Lebanon to Antioch, also to the northeast to the Nazarian settlement in Berœa, where St. Jerome found them. In the desert the Mysteries of Adonis may have still prevailed; in the mountains Aiai Adonai was still a cry.”[308] “Having been united (conjunctus) to the Nazarenes, each (Ebionite) imparted to the other out of his own wickedness, and decided that Christ _was of the seed of a man_,” writes Epiphanius. And if they did, we must suppose they knew more about their contemporary prophet than Epiphanius 400 years later. Theodoret, as shown elsewhere, describes the Nazarenes as Jews who “honor the Anointed as a just man,” and use the _evangel_ called “_According to Peter_.” Jerome finds the authentic and original _evangel_, written in Hebrew, by Matthew the apostle-publican, in the library collected at Cæsarea, by the martyr Pamphilius. “_I received permission from the Nazaræans_, who at Berœa of Syria used this (gospel) to translate it,” he writes toward the end of the fourth century.[309] “In the _evangel_ which the _Nazarenes_ and _Ebionites_ use,” adds Jerome, “which recently I translated from Hebrew into Greek,[310] and which is called by most persons the _genuine Gospel of Matthew_,” etc.