The italicized text below immediately after the bullet is from Bart Ehrman’s post Early Christian Docetism, September 28, 2015. The text following that line is from another of his posts at the cited link.
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.
- Exaltation Christology – The following is from Bart’s post here. But, as scholars have also long recognized, there are elements in these speeches [in Acts] that show that Luke did not make up the speeches out of whole cloth, but he incorporated earlier materials into them. And this is especially the case in the speech of Peter in Acts 2 and that of Paul in Acts 13, where a Christological view is set forth that in fact stands at odds with what Luke himself actually thinks. In both speeches we find an exaltation Christology comparable to what is in Rom. 1:3-4, where at the resurrection God “made” the man Jesus into a glorified being. Thus, in Acts 2:22-36 Peter speaks of Jesus as a “man” who did wondrous things but was crucified, but whom God raised. And the resurrection is the key to understanding who Jesus now is. After detailing the resurrection, Peter says: “Let all the house of Israel there more know with assurance that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” There it is. It was at the resurrection that God “made” Jesus the Lord and made him the “messiah.” This is an exaltation Christology
- Docetism understood Christ to be a fully divine being and therefore not human. Docetism, as [Bart has] indicated on the blog before, derives its name from the Greek word “DOKEO,” which means “to seem” or “to appear.” Marcion taught a docetic view of Christ based on Paul.
- Adoptionism understood him to be a fully human being and not actually divine; The following is from Bart’s post here: …some Christians started thinking that Jesus must not have been made the son of God only at the resurrection; he must have been the son of God for his entire public ministry. And so some adoptionists came to think that Jesus had become the son of God (been “adopted”) not at the resurrection but at his baptism, when the heavens split open, the Spirit descended upon Jesus in the form of a dove, and a voice came from heaven “You are my son in whom I am well pleased.”
- Separationism understood him to be two distinct beings, one human (the man Jesus) and the other divine (the divine Christ); The following is from Bart’s post here: Rather than thinking that Christ was completely divine but not human, most Gnostics appear to have thought that Jesus Christ was two entities, a human Jesus who was temporarily inhabited by a divine being. For them, there was a “separation” between Jesus and the Christ. We might call this a “separationist” Christology. Because the man Jesus was so righteous, a divine being from the heavenly realm came into him at his baptism. That is why the Spirit descended upon Jesus and – as Mark’s Gospel literally says – came “into” him at that point (Mark 1:10). And that is why he could begin doing his miracles then – not earlier – and to deliver his spectacular teachings. But the divine cannot, of course, suffer and die. So, before Jesus died on the cross, the divine element departed from him. This is attested, some Gnostics claimed, by Jesus’ final words: “My God, my God, why have you left me behind?” (Mark 15:34). Jesus was abandoned by his divine element on the cross.
- Modalism understood him to be God the Father became flesh. By the early third century, the view had become widely rejected, even though earlier it had been prominent: that Jesus actually was God the Father, come in the flesh.
- The fifth view [trinity] is the one that “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.
For further study of this topic see Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity Paperback – May 28, 1994 by Jonathan Z. Smith (Author).
A good online read is: Braun, Willi and Andie Alexander. 2021. “Comparing Methods in Christian Origins”, The Religious Studies Project. Podcast Transcript. 19 April 2021. Transcribed by Andie Alexander. Version 1.0, 19 April 2021. Available at: https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/comparing-methods-in-christian-origins/ An extract is below.
WB 32:14
Yeah, Smith has definitely influenced me. I consider him a friend, who unfortunately is no longer with us, and an important mentor. One example, there’s one essay in the book that has to do with the formation of an early Christian group. And it really is an essay about a document, which is referred to as the Sayings Gospel Q. Q is a hypothetical document because nobody’s ever seen it or held it, but it is a product of literary excavation from Mark and from Matthew and Luke, who have all kinds of material that they share verbatim. Anyway, we don’t have to go into that complex history and the Q hypothesis and all that. But let’s just assume it exists as a Sayings Gospel. It’s a gospel that has no biographical information. It’s just a collection of the sayings of Jesus. And in this article, I tried to show that the authors or the producers of Q saw themselves analogously, to a school, a school of philosophy or early Rabbinic schools, and so on. And that is, to make this very short, that in the end, the end of the day, what this document shows is that the producers of it weren’t so much interested in the subject, in the sayings of Jesus themselves, but were using the sayings as a way of forming a group. In the end, the group superseded the sayings in value and importance. And there are a couple of texts, which seem to say almost explicitly, times may be tough, but stick with us folks. This is trying to build loyalty, community affinity, and things like that. So that’s about the formation of a group, not so much an ideological document that they believed in as literally true. That’s way too simplistic, but that would be one example where I use comparison in order to show what the argumentative strategy is in a particular document.
