I don’t think you are up on what “Docetism” means in this field. Christian Science is a modern contrivance and thus cannot inform the ancient context. And its metaphysics is not at all what modern scholars are claiming ancient Christian sects taught.

That’s indeed possible.

It’s why I suspect some heresiologists might be misdescribing some sects they describe as historicists who really weren’t. They will say things like “they preach everything the Gospels say happened” but could that have started at the other end of the telephone game as “they preach from the Gospels”? The heresiologists often make faulty leaps of assumption and often misunderstand (sometimes I suspect deliberately) the sects they attack. Could they simply be assuming, as historicists themselves, that a sect preaching from the Gospels must be preaching the Gospels as histories, when really (in their mysteries) they are preaching them as allegories? (Particularly after in previous generations they were being marginalized, demonized, and shunned for being too open about this.) This would explain why so many of the attacked sects apparently had a lot to say about cosmic mothers and seeds, for example.

But since suspicion isn’t a proof, I can’t do anything with that as a premise. But I keep my eye open, in case I stumble on evidence supporting the suspicion.

In other words, if your sect starts with the assumption that there really was a historical Jesus of Nazareth, then learn of a sect that also believed in Jesus but said he wasn’t really a man who walked the earth and did those things, then I can see how the historicist sect, in trying to reconstruct how the opposing sect came to their beliefs in light of their knowledge from the Gospels that Jesus was in fact historical, could come up with the idea that if they think Jesus “wasn’t really a man” then they must think that he only “seemed to be” a man — voila, “docetism.”

I don’t know if he was considered a docetist, but Tertullian speaks of an heretic follower of Marcion named Apelles whose beliefs (including that “Christ…descended from the upper regions, that in the course of His descent He wove together for Himself a starry and airy flesh”) seem to reflect the mythicist interpretations of Paul and the Ascension of Isaiah.

Note Docetism wasn’t a device used against Mythicism in antiquity. As my article shows, the ancient concept of Docetists were historicists (just “heretical” historicists). And the modern concept of Docetism didn’t exist in antiquity at all. So it can’t have been used anciently against Mythicism.

And I can’t say that is what modern Docetism was invented to do (someone would need to run a historiographic study to show that specifically), even if it is consciously used that way now. Like Gnosticism: it wasn’t invented to avoid something per se. It was just an error. Similarly the low Christology debate did not originate to defeat Mythicism, but to defeat Irrationalism (to make the historical study of Jesus sound more respectable and less like a faith project). But now it can be coopted to dismiss Mythicism—albeit as unevidentially as ever, because the position was never true and had never properly been demonstrated.

Much of the field is like this: all its mistakes (Q, oral tradition, “a baptism by John was embarrassing”) started as something else, were jumped onto too uncritically making them popular, then the “consensus fallacy” made them anchors around the neck of the whole industry that no one could remove, thereby distorting every aspect of the field’s output. And then they were retreated to to defend the bulwarks against Mythicism, because the only way to defend Historicity is to lean on unevidenced assumptions that erroneously became a consensus—because there are no properly evidenced consensus facts that pose any challenge to Mythicism, so that’s all they have.

All I can say for sure is that the modern construct of Docetism was arrived at in error, became too popular on the wings of invalid reasons (like prestige or gullibility or faith or emotional resonance), and then became “locked in” by the “consensus fallacy” as unquestionable.

As far as ancient attacks on Mythicism, they were not this roundabout. They were entirely direct. Ignatius, 2 Peter, the other texts that were not in antiquity called Docetism but clearly attack “mythmongers” in their ranks, are denouncing Mythicists directly. It’s just that in modernity we lost the context that their authors and readers were well aware of and thus being cued to (as the literature of the targeted sects was deliberately not preserved for us), allowing modern scholars to “reinterpret” what those attacks are saying in ways more in line with their faulty developing consensus. Hence, anchor.

But you are right the later heresiologists didn’t want to preserve any more than this, or discuss it openly (Eusebius, for example, absolutely doesn’t want to mention the existence of any such sect as it would entirely undermine his whole project), and so it gets erased from history, like any newly unpopular Soviet politician.

All that remains are texts ambiguous enough to be “spun” as needed. Note for example Ignatius’s entire attack on his opponents (as also 2 Peter’s) gets no mention in Eusebius. He avoided it like the plague. Meanwhile, letters from Paul were selectively edited to keep only parts ambiguous enough to spin as needed (like 1 Corinthians 2, 11, and 15; Galatians 1 and 4; Romans 1, 10 and 16; etc.). We know whole sections from those letters are missing, as well as whole other letters. Who knows what was in those excised sections.

Ignatius was one of the great simplifiers of popular faith for mass appeal. The problem is whether the counter to his faith that Jesus “really did” all these miracles was that he “only seemed to” or “really didn’t”. The Docetist reading is that he “only seemed to”, whereas the Mythicist reading is that he “really didn’t”.

If Jesus was fictional, many contemporaries obviously knew this was the case in the ancient world. The church has been almost completely successful in suppressing memory of this knowledge. Evidence for this knowledge is thin, since the church had every motive to suppress and distort this knowledge.

My view is that ‘so-called Gnostics’ inherited the actual knowledge that the Jesus story was fictional, but this aspect of their culture was successfully eliminated from view. Heresiologists, much like modern theologians, wanted to critique Mythicism without giving it any credence or visibility. They used the idea that Jesus only seemed to come in the flesh as a covert euphemism for the correct Mythicist view that the whole story was made up, in order to more effectively suppress knowledge of Mythicism.

Social traction required simple literalism, as presented by Church Fathers like Ignatius, and literalism required a complete Orwellian suppression of knowledge of alternative historical accounts.

Typos: Doctetists crucifixiom

Which shows how ingrained it has become. This is why it is difficult to let go of.

I generally concur with your observations here.

It also seems to me that identifying the theological principles that rationalize the scriptures and practice (the cult, in the neutral sense,) generally assumes a coherence in those principles, which tends to assume something without sufficient evidence. The apparent assumption that the religion or philosophy or law is to be understood as a deduction from those principles strikes me as even more dubious. The creation of abstract principles in religion and philosophy and law appear to be more often rationalizations of practice. Rationalization may be meretricious excuses for personal preferences, but it can also be the effort to make something not really coherent less contradictory. This is often for practical reasons in the religious life it appears. Creeds are meant as instruments of conformity. Historically they are not able to enforce uniformity. Of themselves, creeds cannot even compel conformity.

The conclusion is that, like talking about Hegelians or Stoics or legal positivist or natural law, historians of religion can fall into the chasm between the lumpers and the splitters. There are those who construct a theoretical commonality between writers, finding a sect or school. And there are those who find the noticeable differences between the alleged members of a school. Was true Stoicism exemplified by Chrysippus or Marcus Aurelius? Whoever was a true Hegelian besides Hegel? To truly distinguish religious sects considerations of texts are not sufficient: Attendance in some form, membership express in obedience at some time, material support, all sorts of living social experiences must be considered, not just an individual’s words. Without that it is ignoring context. There can’t be any sound reading that does that.

Every interpretation of the ancient Christianity predating any historical evidence of the daily practices that wishes away confusions, confusionisms, deliberate strategic ambiguity, misrepresentation, syncretism, and, oh yes, bad grammar so what what intended is not what made it onto the page, is misconceived I think.

Which is an overlong way to say, I rather agree with the post.