The brouhaha over a recent movie that depicts the punishment of Jesus in extremely graphic detail reminds me that I used to be a docetist. Of course, I didn't know it at the time.
You see as I was growing up I had a lot of questions about religion. Since I never got any satisfactory answers, I eventually learned not to bother asking. So I gradually formed my own explanations. One example: since Jesus was supposed to be a god, he couldn't possibly have suffered when the Romans thrashed him and nailed him to a cross. He only pretended to suffer and bleed in order to convince everyone that he was human.
Little did I know that during the early centuries of Christian history, there were actually several groups of Christians who believed that, or something very similar. The belief that Jesus only appeared to suffer because he wasn't really human has come to be called docetism from the Greek word doceo meaning "appear." Gradually docetism was stamped out by the strain of Christianity that eventually triumphed in the fourth century CE.
More information on docetism and other varieties of early Christian beliefs can be found in Bart Ehrman's excellent Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew.
As for me? Oh, I gave up all those silly beliefs ages ago.
Posted by jt at March 6, 2004 01:55 PM