Ignatius,
Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, according to both Solomon Reinach and Earl Doherty:
Christian docetism therefore seems very clearly a way of reconciling the Christian idea of the divine and spiritual Christ, without which there is no Christianity, with a Jewish x. In what way could this x be formulated by the Jews, whose pernicious influence these docetic Christians suffer? Evidently so: "The Jesus of whom you speak to us was not a descendant of David; he was not a son of Mary; he did not come into the world; he did not eat or drink; he was not baptized by John; he was not crucified at the time of Pilate and Herod; he is completely unknown to us". This was not docetism, for the very idea of a "docetic Jew" is absurd, but the diffuse denial of Jesus' existence in the time when Christians placed his life and death.
The radical docetism of the Christians of the first century is therefore a compromise to respond to an insolent denial that took place, which was significant, not in Ephesus or Alexandria, but in the very theatre of Jesus' earthly activity, not one or two centuries later, but almost in the aftermath of his death.
"Yes," said these docetists to the Jews, "you did not know Jesus in the flesh, for the reason that he did not exist according to the flesh; but the apostles and the crowds of the faithful heard him, they saw him; they saw him on the cross at the time of Pilate; they saw him risen. He was a divine ghost, an ethereal and all spiritual being whose eyes have seen, whose ears have heard his voice, but who could not be grasped with his hand".
In the presence of the denials of the Palestinian Jews, it seems that Christians had a simpler way to make them shut their mouths without resorting to the subtleties of docetism: it was to add, in support of Jesus in the flesh, testimonia, authentic documents, for example an act of the synedrium or the report of Pilate. Why did they not do so? I hesitate to answer; but perhaps there were no authentic documents, or perhaps they had not yet dreamed of producing others. This would explain many things: the antecedence of docetism in relation to the Gospels, as Saint Jerome knew; the clearly anti-docetist nature of our four Gospels, even of the Fourth; the Church's susceptibility in this matter and the condemnation of the Gospel of Peter, because isolated signs of docetism were found there.
The author of an excellent life of Jesus according to the apocrypha, Mr. Walter Bauer, says that there is no trace in early Christian or anti-Christian literature of that paradox already familiar to Voltaire and rejected by him, of those who deny the historical reality of Jesus. In fact, if such subversive texts had existed, the Church would not have allowed them to reach us, except in the slums of Jewish literature, where Toledoth's stupid calumnies rightly seemed harmless. But it seems to me impossible not to conclude, as much from the assertions of radical docetism as from the reproach made to docetists coming from Judaism, the existence of a Jewish party, contemporary with the apostles and still powerful at the beginning of the 2nd century, which declared that they knew nothing about Jesus. Once again, those were not docetists, intoxicated by the idea of the divine Christ, but people who were resolutely hostile to the idea of the divinity of Jesus and who also contested the earthly Jesus. Docetist judaized in giving up believing in the Jesus of the flesh; they christianized in affirming the spiritual Christ even more strongly. To these dangerous men, Ignatius still preferred the circumcised, who, without believing in the divinity of Jesus, at least admit that he existed and died under Pilate. Ignatius is right; he is right again when he cries out, "If it is an appearance what has been done by the Lord, then why have I offered myself up to death? To suffer with him all I endure!"
It will perhaps be objected that Docetism was born in Palestine because the Jews, while waiting for the glorious Messiah, were more scandalized than the Gentiles by the ignominious death on the cross. But it would have been enough, to answer them, to admit that the crucified Christ was but a ghost, who had stripped his mortal body at the moment of the Transfiguration. Now, the texts of Saint Ignatius prove that this radical docetism applied to the whole life of Jesus, from his birth until his death. Therefore, it is not the "scandal of the cross" that could suggest this.
The conclusions I have just set out are serious; they seem to offer the equivalent of a 1st century Palestinian document that would support Benjamin Smith's intransigent skepticism. I am asking only to see them discussed and refuted; I respect and listen willingly to theologians; I only ask them to answer me with arguments, not offenses, because I already owe to their liberality a large collection of the latter and because I need the former to enlighten me.
(freely translated from "Questions on Docetism", in
Revue moderniste, 1912, p. 184-188)
