Hello Ulan, I have quite a different impression of the meaning of Docetism from what you describe here. Docetism is defined at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docetism#CITEREFBrox1984 as the belief that “the human form of Jesus was mere semblance.”Ulan wrote:we can clearly say that Docetism is a myth, apart from obvious reasons also because nobody believes in Docetism nowadays, so nobody takes it for reality, that doesn't change that
1. Docetists most probably believed that Christ really existed and did these things, which means he was not a myth for them, and
2. It doesn't tell us anything about whether Christ was a real person or not, just that a real person would obviously not have a body from spirit matter.
The relation between appearance and reality, semblance and truth, is among the oldest and most difficult problems in philosophy. The PreSocratic Parmenides of Elea contrasted the way of truth and the way of seeming, and Plato incorporated this theme in his central epistemological distinction between belief – grounded in uncertain sense impressions - and knowledge – grounded in certain logic.
Gnosticism, grounded in the logos cosmology of a spiritual Christ, had an intellectual framework that condemned acceptance of delusion as ignorant and corrupt. Given the premise that the tale of the Historical Jesus was invented by Gnostics to introduce newcomers to a complex spiritual thought system, the Gnostics would logically have regarded anyone who took these stories as literal historical fact to be deluded, to be confusing appearance and reality.
Gnostic Docetism is therefore the view that Historicist Orthodoxy is fundamentally wrong for taking semblance as truth. It is easy to imagine how this coherent and correct Gnostic view was distorted by malicious heresiologists into a caricature, using their chief weapons of ridicule and mockery. The Epistle of 1 John effectively condemns the notion that literalism points to a deeper truth, indicating the political agenda of conformity to literalism as the lowest common denominator to enable Christian domination.
Docetism is not the view that there was a historical Jesus but he only seemed to be the Christ. Rather, Docetism is the Gnostic view that the essence of Christianity is knowledge of the spiritual Christ, and that orthodox belief in a historical Jesus is a corrupt and ignorant delusion that takes false semblance for true reality.