In the history of Christianity, docetism is the heterodox doctrine that the phenomenon of Jesus, his historical and bodily existence, and above all the human form of Jesus, was mere semblance without any true reality. Broadly it is taken as the belief that Jesus only seemed to be human, and that his human form was an illusion. The word Δοκηταί Dokētaí referring to early groups who denied Jesus's humanity, first occurred in a letter by Bishop Serapion of Antioch, who discovered the doctrine in the Gospel of Peter, during a pastoral visit to a Christian community using it in Rhosus, and later condemned it as a forgery. It appears to have arisen over theological contentions concerning the meaning, figurative or literal, of a sentence from the Gospel of John: "the Word was made Flesh". Docetism was unequivocally rejected at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and is regarded as heretical by the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Orthodox Tewahedo, and many Protestant denominations that accept and hold to the statements of these early church councils.
Definitions
Docetism is broadly defined as any teaching that claims that Jesus' body was either absent or illusory. The term 'docetic' is rather nebulous. Two varieties were widely known. In one version, as in Marcionism, Christ was so divine that he could not have been human, since God lacked a material body, which therefore could not physically suffer. Jesus only appeared to be a flesh-and-blood man; his body was a phantasm. Other groups who were accused of docetism held that Jesus was a man in the flesh, but Christ was a separate entity who entered Jesus's body in the form of a dove at his baptism, empowered him to perform miracles, and abandoned him upon his death on the cross.
Christology and theological implications
Docetism's origin within Christianity is obscure. Ernst Käsemann controversially defined the Christology of St John’s Gospel as "naïve docetism" in 1968. The ensuing debate reached an impasse as awareness grew that the very term "docetism", like "gnosticism", was difficult to define within the religio-historical framework of the debate. It has occasionally been argued that its origins were in heterodox Judaism or Oriental and Grecian philosophies. The alleged connection with Jewish Christianity would have reflected Jewish Christian concerns with the inviolability of monotheism. Docetic opinions seem to have circulated from very early times, 1 John 4:2 appearing explicitly to reject them. Some 1stcentury Christian groups developed docetic interpretations partly as a way to make Christian teachings more acceptable to pagan ways of thinking about divinity. In his critique of the theology of Clement of Alexandria, Photius in his Myriobiblon held that Clement's views reflected a quasi-docetic view of the nature of Christ, writing that " hallucinates that the Word was not incarnate but only seems to be." In Clement's time, some disputes contended over whether Christ assumed the "psychic" flesh of mankind as heirs to Adam, or the "spiritual" flesh of the resurrection. Docetism largely died out during the first millennium AD. The opponents against whom Ignatius of Antioch inveighs are often taken to be Monophysite docetists. In his letter to the Smyrnaeans, 7:1, written around 110AD, he writes: While these characteristics fit a Monophysite framework, a slight majority of scholars consider that Ignatius was waging a polemic on two distinct fronts, one Jewish, the other docetic; a minority holds that he was concerned with a group that commingled Judaism and docetism. Others, however, doubt that there was actual docetism threatening the churches, arguing that he was merely criticizing Christians who lived Jewishly or that his critical remarks were directed at an Ebionite or Cerinthian possessionist Christology, according to which Christ was a heavenly spirit that temporarily possessed Jesus.
Islam and docetism
Some commentators have attempted to make a connection between Islam and Docetism using the following Quranic verse: Some scholars accept that Islam was influenced by Manichaeism in this view. However the general consensus is that Manichaeism was not prevalent in Mecca in the 6th and 7th centuries, when Islam developed.
Since Arthur Drews published his The Christ Myth in 1909, occasional connections have been drawn between docetist theories and the modern idea that Christ was a myth. Shailer Mathews called Drews' theory a "modern docetism". Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare thought any connection to be based on a misunderstanding of docetism. The idea recurred in classicist Michael Grant's 1977 review of the evidence for Jesus, who compared modern scepticism about a historical Jesus to the ancient docetic idea that Jesus only seemed to come into the world "in the flesh". Modern theories did away with "seeming".
