apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

THE GENUINENESS. 379
should have been born as a man, should have eaten and drunk as a
man, should have suffered and died as a man. This gross admixture
with material things in this Divine personage was intolerable. The
only escape from the dilemma lay in Docctisvi. Christ's human life
was not real, but apparetit ox putative.
This Docetic view of Christ's humanity would appeal to popular
Judaism — the Judaism of the Scribes and Pharisees — only so far as it
related to the passmi. A suffering Christ was a stumbling-block in
the way of popular Messianic conceptions. But the human birth and
human life of the promised King of the Jews presented no difBculty
here. Its afitinities were rather with Essenism than with Pharisaism.
Docetism manifested itself in several forms, Irenaeus in one passage
{Haer. iii. i6. i) enumerates three types of this heresy: (i)
The man
Jesus was the mere receptacle of the Christ, who entered him at the
baptism and left him before the crucifixion. (2) The birth and the
death of Christ ahke— His whole human life from beginning to end—
were apparitional, not real. In the passage before us indeed he speaks
only of the passion; but from other passages 18.
(iii. 6, 7, iv. 33. 5,
V. I.
2) it is clear that the Docetism of the persons here mentioned
extended to the whole life of Christ. (3) The Valentinian doctrine,
which conceded to Jesus Christ a body visible and capable of suffering.
This body however was not material. It was not of the substance of
the Virgin, but was only conveyed through her, as water through a
channel. To these three we may add (4) another type of Docetism
mentioned elsewhere by Irenasus (i. 24. 4), and ascribed by him to
Basilides. According to this view Simon the Cyrenian was crucified
instead of Jesus. Jesus exchanged external shapes and appearances
with Simon, and stood by the cross deriding while the crucifixion
took place.
We may confine our attention to the two former and purer types of
Docetism. The remaining two, which are connected with the names
of Basilides (c. a.d. 130) and Valentinus (c. a.d. 150) respectively, are
modifications of Docetism properly so called and are later in point of
date. In the view ascribed to Basilides the Docetism resolves itself
into a trick of magic ;
while that of Valentinus or the Valentinians
betrays itself to be an after-thought by its highly artificial character, as
indeed the comparatively late epoch of Valentinus suggests.
(i)
The first of the two earlier forms is especially connected with
the name of Cerinthus. Its characteristic is the separation of Jesus
from Christ. Cerinthus maintained that Christ descended on Jesus in
the form of a dove at His baptism. Jesus was truly born, truly lived