From Bart Ehrman’s post Early Christian Docetism, September 28, 2015.
From the surviving documents of the period, there appear to have been five major competing Christologies (= understandings of who Christ was) throughout the Christian church, and I will devote a post or two to each of the first four.
- Docetism, the subject of this post, understood Christ to be a fully divine being and therefore not human; [He provides a concise short insert about Marcion and what his followers believed. VERY good.]
- Adoptionism understood him to be a fully human being and not actually divine;
- Separationism understood him to be two distinct beings, one human (the man Jesus) and the other divine (the divine Christ);
- Modalism understood him to be God the Father become flesh.
- The fifth view is the one the “won out,” the Proto-orthodox view that:
- Christ was both human and divine, at one and the same time,
- that he was nonetheless one person and not two persons, and
- that he was distinct from God the Father, both of them being God but there being only one God.
