The presbyter emphasizes that only those who confess
that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (᾽Ιησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα)”
is to be counted among the children of God. Never have there been more
misunderstood words than these. They have been (mis)understood again and again
as solid evidence that the secessionists were docetists. But this is only
because our ‘academic’ histories of early Christology have been so controlled
by the needs, perceptions and polemics of conventional Christianity, even
today, that the traditional Christological categories have not allowed us to
see clearly what was going on.
The cry “in the flesh” was not the presbyter’s cry
against the docetism of the secessionists, since he is merely referring to the
prologue of the Gospel of John which I assume the secessionists knew too. As
far as I have been able to determine, there is no literary-critical evidence
that “the Word became flesh” is a post-secessionist addition to the opening
hymn. The secessionists must have been familiar with it. This means that the
problem was over the interpretation of the passage. What did it mean
that the Logos became flesh? It appears to me that the presbyter took the
meaning of this passage to be ensoulment, that the Logos descended into flesh
at Jesus’ birth and functioned as Jesus’ soul. Or to put it another way, the
Logos was born as Jesus’ psyche in flesh – in bones and blood. Thus I take 1
John 5:6 to be the presbyter’s testimony about Jesus’ advent, that the Logos
did not just come down and possess Jesus at his baptism, “by the water only (ἐν
τῷ ὕδατι μόνον).” Rather Jesus came into being through both water and blood
(δι’ ὕδατος καὶ αἵματος), through baptism and birth. The presbyter
argues that Jesus’ advent through water and blood is proven by the presence of
the Spirit, which is one with the water and the blood. The claim the presbyter
is making is that somehow the Spirit became unified with Jesus’ flesh at birth,
as well as at baptism.
This suggests that the secessionists were arguing that
the reference to the Logos becoming flesh should be understood as the
possession of the man Jesus by a great spirit from above at his baptism, “by
the water only.” This is an entirely different Christological model, and a very
old one at that. This model had developed out of the prophetic tradition, which
understood that God’s Spirit could anoint righteous men, resting in them with
every generation. This model forms the basis for the Christology in the Gospel
of Mark, which uses εἱς to describe Jesus’ possession by the spirit. But
remnants of it are also found in the other synoptics and the Gospel of John,
which all record the descent of the spirit at Jesus’ baptism and the release of
his spirit at the crucifixion. The Gospel of John preserves a saying that must
have been of interest to the secessionists: “This is indeed the
prophet-who-is-to-come into this world!” (April D. DeConick, “Who is Hiding in
the Gospel of John? Reconceptualizing Johannine Theology and the Roots of
Gnosticism,” in Histories of the Hidden God: Concealment and Revelation in
Western Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical Traditions, ed. April D. DeConick
and Grand Adamson [Gnostica Texts & Interpretations; New York: Routledge,
2013], 18-19)
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