Shermana
Heretic
I cannot say for 100% sure everything they believed. However, I can say with 100% confidence in my opinion that they believed that obedience to the Torah was necessary for Salvation of the soul (and body on this Earth), and that Lawlessness (which in Jewish terms meant going against Mosaic Law) would lead one to the fire. This is demonstrated in the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, which is often misinterpreted to mean just believe in Jesus as Messiah (which involves ignoring the context of it being right after Luke 16:17 and the idea of "Moses and the prophets" not meaning their actual teachings but only the vague Messianic prophecies). I believe they believed that Jesus's death on the cross may have served as the Guilt Offering of Isaiah 53:10 and as a Great Sacrifice for all past sins, but not future sins. I believe they believed in strict behavioral standards. That when Jesus said to the Rich man "Obey the commandments" as the key to Eternal Life, it was not some cheap trick at word play, and that the ORIGINAL version of the story in Gospel to the Hebrews says that the Rich Man had totally neglected to give to the poor and thus, when Jesus said to sell everything he had, it wasn't encumbent on EVERYONE to do that but just for him to make up for all the lack of obedience to this major commandment. I believe their beliefs may in fact be codified to a degree in the Didache, and their descendents perhaps in the Clementine Literature. I believe they thought that Jesus "Only came for the Lost Sheep of the House of Israel", and while gentiles were to accept Jesus as the lord of the Earth, his teachings were not meant to be catered to them or watered down for them, and that things like the Council of Jerusalem (And Acts 21:25) were total interpolations, as the notorious Tubingen school believed. I believe much light on the early beliefs was shed by the Tubingeners, and Christian Conservative scholars never really defeated their opinions but merely swept them under the rug hoping they'd go away. Which they were successful at doing for the most part.
I believe they were very works-based, believed in a sort of "Karma" in which all men are judged by their actions for good or worse, just like Judaism, and were basically just a branch of early Jewish thought, like the Essenes who I think may have been similar to them in many ways.
It's also important to know that James the Just, leader of the early Christians, was known as "Jacob the Gnostic" in the Talmud. Now that brings up an interesting can of worms: What exactly were the original Gnostics who were Jewish Christians? (As opposed to the later gentile Gnostic schools). I believe that there is a whole world to the beliefs of the early Jewish Christians that has been lost to history, perhaps deliberately, which only recently have bits and pieces been discovered to the rest of the world for viewing. For example, what we see in the Nag Hammadi literature may be various sects' interpretations and revisionings of what was once an original Jewish-"Gnostic"-Christian movement led by the Jerusalem Church, which wasn't really "Gnostic" in the sense of Medieval Albigensians and Cathars but more like Essene-ish Jews.
Where they are today? Good question. I believe a small, tiny sect that retained the truth survived and stayed underground in Israel after the carnage of 70 A.D. and was forced into hiding by one authority or another. Proving that effectively is not something I can do at this time, and I believe that there's good reason to think many documents about the early Nazarenes and Ebionites may have been deliberately destroyed.
Why don't other Christians regard this Nazarene Torah obedient belief to be the True Church? Well, where do I begin? First, Paul. Second, Paul. Third, Orthodox Teaching. Fourth, Orthodox teaching. Fifth, orthodox Teaching. Sixth, Paul. Catch my drift?
However, there's more to it. It's also about a convenience mentality, a "Supercessionist" idea of replacing the Jews, a militant misunderstanding of the Scriptures, insistence on Orthodox teaching and Paul's views, herd mentality, unwillingness to accept basic historical fact that goes against confirmaiton bias, willful ignorance of the "Old Testament" and why they even believe Jesus was considered Messiah in the first place, the comfort of being "saved" without actually doing or believing what Jesus taught, various dodgy theologies that radically twist the scripture but are nonetheless standard, an irrational aversion to some of the better NT "Apocrypha" (And OT Pseudipigrapha, some of which even the early Church Fathers went by including the NT Apocrypha the early church fathers went by), a reliance on appeal to authority of the orthodox scholars and theologians who have a vested power interest, you get what I'm saying? Need I go on? Personal issues may play just as much of a role in dismissing such concepts and history as the authority of the doctrine itself. What exactly causes people to not spend a day or two researching the roots of their beliefs apart from their own ecclesiastical paramaters?
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