Year: 90

Rise of Gnostic heresies within the church. Some gnostics deny Jesus' humanity (Docetism), saying that he merely appeared to have a body. Gnostics claim to have secret knowledge beyond divine revelation and faith.
"In Christianity, docetism (from the Greek δοκέω [dokeō], "to seem") is the belief that Jesus' physical body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion; that is, Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and to physically die, but in reality he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die. This belief treats the sentence "the Word was made Flesh" (John 1:14 *The Word became a human being and lived here with us. We saw his true glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father. From him all the kindness and all the truth of God have come down to us.) as merely figurative. Docetism has historically been regarded as heretical by most Christian theologians.

This belief is most commonly attributed to the Gnostics, many of whom believed that matter was evil, and as a result God would not take on a material body. This statement is rooted in the idea that a divine spark is imprisoned within the material body, and that the material body is in itself an obstacle, deliberately created by an evil, lesser god (the demiurge) to prevent man from seeing his divine origin.

Docetism can be further explained as the view that since the human body is temporary and the spirit is eternal, the body of Jesus must have been an illusion and, likewise, his crucifixion. Even so, saying that the human body is temporary has a tendency to undercut the importance of the belief inresurrection of the dead and the goodness of created matter, and is in opposition to this orthodox view.

Docetism was a form of early Christianity, developing around 70 AD, which was most prominently espoused by Gnostic sects. Its origin within Christianity is obscure and it has been argued that its origins were in heterodox Judaism or Oriental and Grecian philosophies. Some of the books of the New Testament condemn docetic teachings and the early creeds developed to counter docetic beliefs.^[5] First century Gnostic Christian groups developed docetic interpretations partly as a way to make Christian teachings more acceptable to pagan ways of thinking of divinity."