Docetism

Docetism, with its phantom Christ, and Gnosticism with its antithesis of the just God and the good God, were not likely to satisfy mankind.

Clement and Origen, at the head of the Alexandrian school, took a somewhat subtle view of the Incarnation, and Docetism pervades their controversies with the Monarchians.

Docetism, originating in apostolic times, passed through many phases, to provide, at the end of the fourth century, in its most refined form, Apollinarianism, the immediate positive cause of monophysitism.

Obviously the tendency of Ephesian Christianity was to minimise the human characteristics of the historic Jesus, and to merge into Docetism.

The heresy combated by Ignatius is a type of Gnostic Judaism, the Gnostic element manifesting itself in a sharp form of Docetism.