across the middle of it. In view of that, how could the Jews easily accept the hope that Jesus would come and save them? The holy city was desolate; the Jews were dispersed throughout the world. In view of that, how could it be true that the Messiah had come?
The Denial of the Incarnation
There was something even more serious than that. There was false teaching which came directly from an attempt from within the Church to bring Christianity into line with Gnosticism. We must remember the Gnostic point of view that spirit alone was good and matter utterly evil. Given that point of view, any real incarnation is impossible. That is exactly what, centuries later, St Augustine was to point out. Before he became a Christian, he was skilled in the philosophies of the various schools. In the Confessions (8:9), he tells us that somewhere in the writings of the Platonists he had read in one form or another nearly all the things that Christianity says; but there was one great Christian saying which he had never found in any of these works and which no one would ever find – and that saying was: ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’ (John 1:14). Since these thinkers believed in the essential evil of matter and therefore the essential evil of the body, that was one thing they could never say.
It is clear that the false teachers against whom John was writing in this First Letter denied the reality of the incarnation and of Jesus’ physical body. ‘Every spirit’, writes John, ‘that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God’ (1 John 4:2–3).
In the early Church, this refusal to admit the reality of the incarnation took, broadly speaking, two forms.
(1) In its more radical and wholesale form, it was called Docetism, which the scholar E. J. Goodspeed suggests might be translated as Seemism. The Greek verb dokein means to seem; and the Docetists taught that Jesus only seemed to have a body. They insisted that he was a purely spiritual being who had nothing but the appearance of having a body. One of the apocryphal books written from this point of view is the Acts of John, which dates from about AD 160. In it, John is made to say that sometimes when he touched Jesus he seemed to meet with a material body, but at other times ‘the substance was immaterial, as if it did not exist at all’, and also that, when Jesus walked, he never left any footprint upon the ground. The simplest form of Docetism is the complete denial that Jesus ever had a physical body.
(2) There was a more subtle, and perhaps more dangerous, variant of this theory connected with the name of Cerinthus. In tradition, John and Cerinthus were sworn enemies. The great early Church historian Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History, 4:14:6) hands down a story which tells how John went to the public bathhouse in Ephesus to bathe. He saw Cerinthus inside and refused even to enter the building. ‘Let us flee,’ he said, ‘lest even the bathhouse fall, because Cerinthus the enemy of truth is within.’ Cerinthus drew a definite distinction between the human Jesus and the divine Christ. He said that Jesus was a man, born in a perfectly natural way. He lived in special obedience to God, and after his baptism the Christ in the shape of a dove descended upon him, from that power which is above all powers, and then he brought news of the Father who up to that point had been unknown. Cerinthus did not stop there. He said that, at the end of Jesus’ life, the Christ again withdrew from him so that the Christ never suffered at all. It was the human Jesus who suffered, died and rose again.
This again comes out in the stories of the apocryphal gospels written under the influence of this point of view. In the Gospel of Peter, written in about AD 130, it is said that Jesus showed no pain upon the cross and that his cry was: ‘My power! My power! Why have you forsaken me?’ It was at that moment that the divine Christ left the human Jesus. The Acts of John go further. They tell how, when the human Jesus was being crucified on Calvary, John was actually talking to the divine Christ in a cave in the hillside and that the Christ said to him: ‘John, to the multitude down below in Jerusalem I am being crucified, and pierced with lances and with reeds, and gall and vinegar are given me to drink. But I am speaking to you, and listen to what I say . . . Nothing, therefore, of the things they will say of me have I suffered’ (Acts of John 97).
We may see from the Letters of Ignatius how widespread this way of thinking was. Ignatius was writing to a group of churches in Asia Minor which must have been much the same as the group to which 1 John was written. When Ignatius wrote, he was a prisoner and was being transported to Rome to be martyred by being flung to the wild animals in the arena. He wrote to the Trallians: ‘Be deaf, therefore, when anyone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was of the family of David and Mary, who was truly born, both ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died . . . who also was truly raised from the dead . . . But if, as some affirm, who are without God – that is, who are unbelievers – his suffering was only a semblance . . . why am I a prisoner?’ (Ignatius, To the Trallians, 9–10). To the Christians at Smyrna, he wrote: ‘For he suffered all these things for us that we might attain salvation, and he truly suffered even as he also truly raised himself, not as some unbelievers say that his passion was merely in semblance’ (To the Smyrnaeans, 2). Polycarp, writing to the Philippians, used John’s very words: ‘For everyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an anti-Christ’ (To the Philippians, 7:1).
This teaching of Cerinthus is also rebuked in 1 John. John writes of Jesus: ‘This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood’ (1 John 5:6). The point of that verse is that the Gnostic teachers would have agreed that the divine Christ came by water, that is, at the baptism of Jesus; but they would have denied that he came by blood, that is, by the cross, for they insisted that the divine Christ left the human Jesus before his crucifixion.
The great danger of this heresy is that it comes from what can only be called a mistaken reverence. It is afraid to ascribe to Jesus full humanity. It regards it as irreverent to think that he had a truly physical body. It is a heresy which is by no means dead but is still held today, usually quite unconsciously, by many devout Christians. But it must be remembered, as John so clearly saw, that our salvation was dependent on the full identification of Jesus Christ with us. As one of the great early Church fathers unforgettably put it, ‘He became what we are to make us what he is.’
This Gnostic belief had certain practical consequences in the lives of those who held it.
(1) The Gnostic attitude to matter and to all created things produced a certain attitude to the body and the things to do with the body. That attitude might take any one of three different forms.
(a) It might take the form of self-denial, with fasting and celibacy and rigid control, even deliberate ill-treatment, of the body. The view that celibacy is better than marriage and that sex is sinful goes back to Gnostic influence and belief – and this is a view which still lingers on in certain quarters. There is no trace of that view in this letter.
(b) It might take the form of an assertion that the body did not matter and that, therefore, its appetites might be satisfied without restraint. Since the body was in any event evil, it made no difference what was done with it. There are echoes of this in this letter. John condemns as liars all who say that they know God and yet do not keep God’s commandments; those who say that they abide in Christ ought to walk as Christ walked (1 John 1:6, 2:4–6). There were clearly Gnostics in these communities who claimed special knowledge of God but whose conduct was a long way from the demands of the Christian ethic.
In certain quarters, this Gnostic belief went even further. Gnostics were people who had gnōsis, knowledge. Some held that real Gnostics must, therefore, know the best as well as the worst and must enter into every experience of life at its highest or at its deepest level, as the case may be. It might almost be said that such people held that it was an obligation to sin. There is a reference to this kind of belief in the letter to Thyatira in the book of Revelation, where the risen Christ refers to those who have known ‘the deep things of Satan’ (Revelation 2:24). And it may well be that John is referring to these people when he insists that ‘God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’ (1 John 1:5). These particular Gnostics would have held that there was in God not only blazing light but also deep darkness – and that an