Loading...Just as there were “adoptionist” Christians in the second century, who maintained that Christ was not really a divine being, but a human being who had been “adopted” to be divine by God (so: not pre-existent; not born of a virgin; not “equal” with God; etc.), so too, on the other end of the spectrum, there were others who claimed that he was so *entirely* God that he was not actually human.
Here is how I talk about early representatives of that view in my book How Jesus Became God.
****************************
We have seen that those holding adoptionist views of Christ claimed to represent the earliest views of Jesus’ own apostles. Of course, every group representing every view of early Christianity claimed that its views were the original teachings of Jesus and his earthly followers – but in the case of the adoptionists, they may well have been right. The view we will consider now is in some ways the polar opposite: it maintained that rather than being completely human, and so not – by nature – divine, Christ instead was completely divine, and so not – by nature – human. Eventually this view came to be labeled “docetism,” from the Greek word DOKEŌ, which means “to seem” or “to appear.” According to this view Christ was not really a man, but only “appeared” to be. He in fact was completely God. And God, for these believers, could not be a human any more than a human can be a rock.
This understanding too can be traced back to early times, though not nearly as early as the adoptionist understanding rooted in exaltation Christologies. Docetic views, when first we meet them, appear to have emerged out of incarnation Christologies later in the first century – but still during the times of the New Testament. One would be hard pressed to see them as views adopted by the original followers of Jesus, however. As we have seen, there may be some reason to suspect that Paul held to some such views – but it is very difficult to say. Paul does speak about Christ coming in the “likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom 8:3) and to have been “in appearance” as a human (Phil 2:7); but he never spells out clearly his views about the humanity of Jesus. He does, however, say that Christ was actually “born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4), and that does not sound like the sort of thing most docetists would want to claim.
As a result, the first clear attestation of a docetic view comes only near the end of the New Testament period, in the book known as 1 John. The author of this anonymous work…
1 John is the only book of the Bible that uses the term “antichrist.” I bet you won’t know what it means by it! Want to see? Join the blog and you’ll get this post and four others every week.
If memory serves, some time ago you said that you were planning to gather together the posts that you wrote on a particular topic and then present these as a go-to resource on that subject. Did that plan materialise and if so do you intend to provide these ‘Trinity’ posts in that format?
It’s a project still in my imagination. But these trnity posts would be an ideal set of candidates.
I spent a horrible Summer during my graduate work on Church history trying to read my way through as much of the voluminous Catholic literature on Trinity as I could. I’m Jewish and I see God as a monad but I was in a Catholic program so I figured I could at least get some idea. I failed at understanding it and returned to class in September shamefaced. When I told one of my classmates, she laughed. “Why did you put yourself through that?” she asked. “It’s a matter of faith.” I have the same view of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. I spent a long time with Jaroslav Pelikan’s trip through the world of heresies and came to the conclusion that he was adopted after being baptized (i.o.w. going through a mikveh the way Jews did in his time). I still think God’s a monad but since I have been studying astrophysics as a hobby, God’s a much bigger and older monad.
BDEhrman, what do you think about the argument of Nicola Denzey Lewis who says the gospel of John maybe want to reply to the (proto)gospel of Thomas?
It’s a view that was popularized before Nicola Denzey Lewis by Elaine Pagels who was picking it up from others (esp. Greg Riley, I would imagine), and I don’t find it convincing. One could easily argue that the Thomasine traditions were reacting to John, I suppose.
Whenever I see creationists talking about “teach the controversy! creationism deserves equal time!” I want to reply with “teach the controversy! docetism deserves equal time!”.
Yeah, I want to say “teach the controversy! the earth is hollow; the moon is made of green cheese; and you’re a figment of my imagination!”
Oh my, the Earth is hollow…. and we live on the inside. Looking up is looking to the center where the stars are…. All part of the beliefs of the Koreshan Unity at their commune on the Southern tip of Estero Island (aka Fort Myers Beach Fla.) back in the late 19nth Century to early 20th. They followed some , well, person by the name of Cyrus Teed who “Persion-ized” his name to Koresh (like Cyrus the Great) who promised he would be resurrected when he died. So, when he did die, they kept his body in their dining hall until it got really bad and the Lee County Health Department came in and buried him on the very Southern tip of the island. I believe it Was the terrible 1935 Labor Day Hurricane that washed the grave into the Gulf of Mexico!
@AstaKask,
Pastafarianism was founded exactly on these ideas of basic fairness . Look it up, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sfnnJBk3aY
You sound like a convert already!
Did docetism come out of the belief that human flesh was corrupt and Jesus could not be god if he occupied a corrupt human body? Gnosticism had a similar belief that the material world was imperfectly created by an evil demiurge so that idea seems to resonate among many in the ancient world.
More or less, probably so.
It seems to me the pagans coming into the early church would have been fine with the idea that God adopted Jesus as His son and exalted him to divine status, to sit at His right hand. Would it be too simplistic to summarize that the confusing Trinity concept was developed because a) Jesus had to be portrayed as the greatest God, and b) they had to maintain that there was only one God, as opposed to the polytheism of paganism? (I realize nothing in theology is ever truly simple!)
God chose a man and raised him from the dead and appointed him judge over all. Such beliefs can be found in the 17th chapter of the book of Acts.(Preaching of Paul at Mars). Is this view of adoptionist.?
Yup!
That would make more sense, and you could do away with the Trinity and the Virgin Birth. From the viewpoint of early church leaders, though, the more important your god is, the more important you are. So raising Jesus Christology increases the power of the church leaders. It is all rather self-serving.
I never understood Jesus. I understand the creator & the spirit [as I thought I was walking in the light].
But how could I love Jesus, as I understood it thenL God condemned the Jews until Jesus which thereafter condemned everyone.
I’ve always wondered if perhaps some kind of docetism might have originated with Greek converts who could not quite believe in the flesh and bone resurrection of Jesus. A spiritual, divine exalted existence of the soul, that they could accept, but not a resurrection of a human body of flesh and bone. I don’t think there’s any evidence of this, but it seems like a plausible starting point. What do you think?
I think they *have* to be closely related; if not directly then by the same motivation: God can’t be flesh and blood because the material cannot truly embody the divine — which is more or less the same reason the flesh can’t be raised immortal; only divine beings are immortal and divine beings can’t be fleshly. Traditional Jews just wouldn’t have that problem.
At time of the apostles and Paul, the religious culture of their day – both Jewish and pagan – accommodated gradations along a human-divine spectrum, with belief in a number of exceptional human beings who became divinised in some sense, along with legendary demigods in pagan culture. Yet from late 1st century, various sects sprung up which viewed divinity and humanity in mutually exclusive categories – the Theodotians rejecting divinity of Jesus, the Docetists rejecting his humanity. The Trinitarians likewise presuppose mutually exclusive conceptions – except in the case of Jesus. Hence they have to engage in a great deal of mental gymnastics to defend coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity. Life would be so much simpler if everybody reverted back to the early years of Christianity, with a flexible notion of divinity!
I agree. or that we all have a Divine Spark and Jesus’s was significantly brighter than most or all of us.
Thinking out loud here 🙂 … if the adoptionists had the earliest view is it possible that this is why we see so many stories in the Gospels making the human Jesus into a God-like figure? – the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Miracles, etc. Maybe not so much because they were literal stories, but more so parabolic in order to support their belief that the human Jesus had been adopted as God’s Son?
I think that’s certainly the earliest Christian views of why Jesus could do miracles. ANd it went from there to Jesus himself being divine.
If Jesus was divine [God}, why would he say – Matthew 24:34. “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled? Mark 13:30 also. If he were God he would know that wouldn’t happen. This is very confusing!
The traditional Christian answer is that he was also truly human, and that he had to limit his knowledge to the level of a human’s or he would not have been human. The other traditional answer is that Jesus is right! The “generation” means the “race” of the Jews, who will not die out until all these things take place (generation and race can both translate the same Greek word)
Question for Bart: So many Christians insist that Jesus is the ONLY way to get to “the Father” (heaven, the Kingdom). But when he said I AM the way, was he really speaking of himself, personally, as a human being? Could we not insert an implied IS into that statement,: I AM IS the way? My deduction then yields the “divinity of Jesus, and all of us. (So crucify me, as a universalist just as the “Temple bullies crucified Jesus!)
~eric. @ MeridaGOround.com
Probably not, from the Greek grammar. At least it is clear that his opponents didn’t take it this way. They took up stones to execute him for blasphemy!
Hi Bart, I have heard two traditions about how John died. One of them is the traditional one that says that he died in his 90s in Ephesus of natural causes and the other based on Marcs 10: 35-41 that for some suggests that he were martyred some time after Jesus death. Which one do you think is correct and is that interpretation of that biblical passage possible?
Mark does seem to know something about John’s death, before it’s writing (around 70 CE?); the tradition about his death in Ephesus is a later legend, first found in the apocryphal Acts of John from the early third century.
I had a historian friend once (Baptist heritage) who in passing commented that the majority of churchgoers are at base probably adoptionist (maybe excepting the virgin birth because it had been so exalted in Xmas myths etc,). If one could frame a questionnaire that didn’t trigger programmed responses as a member of a particular sect, do you think there is any truth in his observation? You have such a wide experience with Christian believers as a whole that I would value any insight.
My sense is that the majority of Christians are docetists. They think Jesus REALLY is God, and the human part was more for show. If he wanted to, he really could have spoken Swahili as a five-year old….
Bart, I saw on the news today that a 2000-year-old Dead Sea Scroll was discovered in Israel. Do you know anything about this?
Just what I’m reading. . Amazing.
I would love to here your thoughts on this in a future post.
anti christs, little “a”… is an excellent point to make. Why do you think many Christians believe in a coming Antichrist, when the only usage of the term in the NT clearly refers to no such future and above all else bad figure? Why is there an association with the beast and it’s mark with such a canonically unsubstantiated idea?
Because the Beast of Revelation fits in with the dispensational understanding of the coming of teh anti-Christ based on 2 THess. 2, using the term picked up from 1 John.
Enigmatic, based upon your own statement that the person of lawlessness/perdition etc is a reference to the Roman emperor. Are you suggesting double entendre? Perhaps the pseudepigraphal writer of 2 thesis is dependent on revelation? Or that the canonically unfounded dispositionalist position has merit? Canonical merit?
I would say dispensationalism is definitely not supported by the Bible, though I see how proponents get it fromo there (since I was a hard-core dispensationalist in my late teens/early twentties)
Hi! So, I was doing some reading and I learned about the early Jewish Christians who seemed to have a completely different outlook on Jesus than many Christians hold today.
The Ebionites, Gnostics, Manicheans, Sabians, Mandeans, Nestorians and Elkasites, all seemed to follow the Nazarene philosophy which held a hostility towards Pauline views and believed Jesus to be not God but just a messiah.
Also, I learned that there is a collection of Arabic manuscripts kept in a library in Istanbul which contains quotes from a 5th or 6th Century text ascribed to the ‘al-nasara’, written in Syriac and found in a monastery in Khuzistan in south-west Iran near the Iraq border. It shows the views of the Nazarene hierarchy escaping from Jerusalem after the destruction in 66 AD. It refers to Jesus as a human being and stresses the Judaic Law.
Also, I’m not sure, but I believe these Christians were taught the meaning of Christianity by Jesus himself?
There seems to be a split in the teachings by James the Righteous in Jerusalem the Pauline doctrines.
So, I guess my question is why were these early teachings not given preference over Pauline teachings?
The only one of those groups you name that could be called “Jewish Christian” would be the Ebionites. And no, there is no reliable evidence of Jerusalem Christians escaping Jerusaalem at the beginning of the war. THe old tradition dated to teh 4th century is that they went to Pella. But no 5-6th c. ms allegedly in a monastery in Iran would have any bearing on the question. (It’s very easy for people to talk about obscure mss that no one has seen; this may be one of those. You always need to see what the evidence is. Amazing how much “evidence” is simply made up or actually forged).
You mention about many of the Gospels/Epistles how they were probably not written by who they are attributed to, like this one for instance. Are there documented reasons for this? How did or who did the “attributing”?
Also, is there a chart or timeline you could provide that shows the, as best can be ascertained, the order and approximate dates the above documents probably originated?
Yes indeed, but it’s a long story. I discuss it in my book Forged. A timeline of early Christain books is tricky, and can never be precise. Paul’s authentic letteers are earliest, from 49-62 CE or so; Gospels: Mark 70; Matthew and Luke 80-85 (with Acts soon after); John 90-95. Johannine epistles a bit after that; Revelation about the same time. 2 Peter is usually dated last, around 120 CE. The others are probably between 70-100, but it’s very hard to date many of them.
It’s hard to understand.
First, as you have pointed out, the Greek “Christ” is the same name/ title, as the antic Jews in the Hebrew Bible called the Messiah, or the “anointed one,” of whom there are a few, as King David and Cyrus the Great.
In the New Testament (for example, in John and in the Revelation), Jesus Christ is also referred to as the “Logos” which by many relates to the myth / symbol, / condition or the divine primordial man, the mystic “Adam”. This idea, view, principle can be found in many other ancient religions, as I do among the ancient Greek philosophers, which seems to be an elevated understanding of Christ compared to the ancient Hebrew tradition.
For Carl Gustav Jung, from a psychological persepctive, Christ is the still living myth of our culture, and is in his opinion the archetype of the “Self” which represents the whole of a divine and heavenly, glorified man, who corresponds to the first Adam before fall, and then is the true image of God (printed on the soul), after whos likeness the inner man is made, invisibly incorporeal, incorrupt, immortal.
With such a variety of understanding of what Christ really is, in on hand as a name of a person, or a title of a person, where the anti-Christ is those who area against this person, and in the other hand, a perseption of Christ which refers to a much deeper quality of the inner man who is a kind of emenation of God, and the Anti Christ is qualities which oppose those same qualities.
To me, this is an irreconcilable and different perception of what Christ is, and of what Anti Christ is. No wonder the understanding, views tends to end up in some time dramatically different perseptions.
Dr: Ehrman: What advice would you give to any person who wishes to know anything? Even if they do not attend college?
I’d give the same advice a college professor of mine gave us: Read! Read! Read! (But it’s important to read real scholarship by those who know what they’re talking about; otherwise it’s a waste of time or worse)
1John references the concept of the anointing 1 John 2:20 and 1 John 2:27
1 John 2:20: But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things.. NKJV
1 John 2:27: But the anointing which you have received from Him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teaches you; but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true, and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you will abide in Him. NKJV
When we look at 1 John 4:1-3 it is saying Jesus came in the flesh, and by extension, it is not unreasonable to infer the author is saying the miracles were created by the anointing on Jesus not a divine version of Jesus.
The presence of God is further referenced in 1 John 4:4. You are of God, little children, and have overcome them because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.
Christ is the Greek word for the anointing and the context of the verse has multiple references to the presence and the anointing. Is it possible the phrase ‘spirits of antichrist’ is referring to a spirit that is anti the anointing?
My sense is that when early Christians heard the word “Christ” they were not thinking of its etymology as having to with “anointing” of a king or priest or prophet or othr holy person. They were thinking of Jesus as a person. When they heard “anti-Christ” I think they must have heard “the one who is opposed to Christ.”
Quote: “He does, however, say that Christ was actually “born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4), and that does not sound like the sort of thing most docetists would want to claim.” – why do you quote it like that ? Your book says this was a change by scribes from genomenon to gennaomenon. Ginomai + ek does not imply a physical derivation but a channel. The voice of God comes out of heaven (ginomai + ek). Does God’s voice now consist of the material “heaven” ? Clearly not. Docetism is a strawman against heavenly flesh. If you read Yamauchi’s “Crucifiction and Docetic Christologies” paper on Docetism you will find that Docetists were basing their ideas on the (supposed) material immutability of God. As do proponents of Chalcedon. The hypostatic union is actually docetic and it is adoptionism as well (human nature gets personalized by a divine hypostasis that never changes). The Christ came down here on christmas eve (MacArthur, James White, Spurgeon, John Gill, many more). This Son only appeared to be a man. He was really a divine agent who personalized an avatar. He left the human nature at death to go preach in hell for 3 days. Separationist.
I think a lot of fourth-century theologians, and modern scholars who study them, would be scratching their heads to hear themselves escreibes as both docetic and adoptinist. And yes, I have read Yamauchi’s paper. It was pretty good but not the most important thing on the topic. As to gignomai, you probably know, since you appear to know Greek, that Baur-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker gives “born” as the first definition, as, more important, does Liddell-Scott and the New Cambridge Lexicon — with, of course, plenty of classical examples.
Letˋs stick with the example: “Ginomai + ek”. According to you, scribes were seeking to change this in order to stress the birth of the seed of David respectively the birth of a woman. So that was actually your own reasoning.. “Classic examples” from philosophers or from the bible ? – I named an example from Luke 3:22. What do you make of Luke 3:22 ? Quote from your book (Rm 1:3): “the change was a matter of the substitution of a word in the versions and of a few simple letters in Greek (from genomenon to gennaomenon), so that now the text speaks not of Christ “coming from the seed of David ” but of his “being born of the seed of David.” – as for theologians, we knew how skewed their ability to reason is. Dogmatism kills reasoning. Fact is: God, the Son (which does not exists in the first place) gave the enhypostasis to the human nature, which was an anhypostasis. No conversion took place, no mixture. That is a real man ? Come on. It is not “becoming” either but “taking on”. If I “take on” my jacket, I am not the jacket.