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[188] [18] Like the Gnostics, Marcion argued that Jesus was essentially a divine spirit appearing to men in the shape of a human form, and not someone in a true physical body. [190] Marcion held that the heavenly Father (the father of Jesus Christ) was an utterly alien god; he had no part in making the world, nor any connection with it. [190]
Christ is then sent to earth in the form of the man Jesus to give men the gnosis needed to rescue themselves from the physical world and return to the spiritual world. In Gnosticism, the Gospel story of Jesus is itself allegorical: it is the Outer Mystery used to introduce Gnosis rather than truth in a historical context.
The Sophia The Christ, also known as the Wisdom of Jesus Christ, is a Gnostic text that was first discovered in the Berlin Codex (a Codex purchased in Cairo in 1896 and given to the Berlin Museum which also contains the Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon of John, and a summary of the Act of Peter).
In portraying Christ as a spirit that came from heaven, undertook its divine task in the material world, and then returned, he anticipates the fully developed Christian Gnosticism in later decades. Irenaeus numbers Cerinthus among those Gnostics who denied that Jesus is the Logos (Word) .
Jesus only appeared to be a flesh-and-blood man; his body was a phantasm. Other groups who were accused of docetism held that Jesus was a man in the flesh, but Christ was a separate entity who entered Jesus' body in the form of a dove at his baptism, empowered him to perform miracles, and abandoned him upon his death on the cross. [14]
They acknowledged that Christ suffered and died, but believed that "in his incarnation, Christ transcended human nature so that he could prevail over death by divine power". [40] These beliefs are what caused Irenaeus to say of the Valentinians, "Certainly they confess with their tongues the one Jesus Christ, but in their minds they divide him."
The belief that Jesus Christ was not the Son of God from eternity, but was adopted by God at some point in his life. [4] Valentinianism: Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, mainline Protestantism: A Gnostic heresy that taught that the world was created by a series of emanations from the supreme being.
In the Gnostic Christian tradition, Christ is seen as a wholly divine being which has taken human form in order to lead humanity back to the Light. [2] The Cathars of medieval Europe also shared the belief in the divine spark. [3] They saw this idea expressed most powerfully in the opening words of the Gospel of St John.