In the Clementine Recognitions, a work issuing from the Ebionite anti‐ Gnostic school, we find that the abolition of the sacrifices was strongly insisted on. The abomination of idolatry is first exposed, and the strong hold that Egyptian idolatry had upon the Israelites is pointed out; then we are told Moses received the Law, and, in consideration of the prejudices of the people, tolerated sacrifice: “When Moses perceived that the vice of sacrificing to idols had been deeply ingrained into the people from their association with the Egyptians, and that the root of this evil could not be extracted from them, he allowed them to sacrifice indeed, but permitted it to be done only to God, that by any means he might cut off one half of the deeply ingrained evil, leaving the other half to be corrected by another, and at a future time; by him, namely, concerning whom he said himself, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise unto you, whom ye shall hear, even as myself, according to all things which he shall say to you. Whosoever shall not hear that prophet, his soul shall be cut off from his people.”(228) In another place the Jewish sacrifices are spoken of as sin.(229) This hostility to the Jewish sacrificial system by Ebionites who observed all the other Mosaic institutions was due to their having sprung out of the old sect of the Essenes, who held the sacrifices in the same abhorrence.(230) That our Lord may have spoken against the sacrifices is possible enough. The passage may have stood thus: “Think not that I am come to destroy the Law and the Prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil; nevertheless, I tell you the truth, I am come to destroy the sacrifices. But be ye approved money‐changers, choose that which is good metal, reject that which is bad.” It is probable that in the original Hebrew Gospel there was some such passage, for St. Paul, or whoever was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, apparently alludes to it twice. He says, “When he cometh into the world he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared me.”(231) The plain meaning of which is, not that David had used those words centuries before, in prophecy, but that Jesus had used them himself when he came into the world. If the writer of the Epistle did quote a passage from the Hebrew Gospel, it will have been the second from the same source. In the Ebionite Gospel, “by a criminal fraud,” says St. Epiphanius, a protestation has been placed in the mouth of the Lord against the Paschal Sacrifice of the Lamb, by changing a positive phrase into a negative one. When the disciples ask Jesus where they shall prepare the Passover, he is made to reply, not, as in St. Luke, that with desire he had desired to eat this Passover, but, “_Have I then any desire to eat the flesh of the Paschal Lamb with you?_”(232)