DOCETÆ (from δοκεω, to appear), a name applied to those heretics in the early Christian church who held that Christ, during his life, had not a real or natural, but only an apparent or phantom body. From this circumstance they were also called Phantasiastæ, Phantasiadocetæ, Opinari, and Opinati. The origin of this opinion is to be sought in the Greek, Alexandrine, and Oriental philosophizing about the imperfection or rather the essential impurity of matter. Traces of a Jewish Docetism are to be found in Philo; and in the Christian form it is combatted in the writings of John, and more formally in the epistles of Ignatius. It differed much in its complexion according to the points of view adopted by the different authors. Among the Gnostics and Manichæans it existed in its worst type, and in a milder form it is to be found even in the writings of the orthodox teachers. The bolder docetæ assumed the position that Christ was born without any participation of matter; that his eating and drinking, and even his crucifixion, was a mere phantasm. They denied, accordingly, the resurrection and the ascent into heaven. Some held that another man was crucified instead of Christ. To this class belonged Dositheus, Saturninus, Cerdo, Marcion, and their followers, the Ophites, Manichæans, and others. The other, or milder school of Docetæ, attributed to Christ an ethereal and heavenly instead of a truly human body. Amongst these were Valentinus, Bardesanes, Basilides, Tatianus, and their followers. They varied considerably in their estimation of the share which this body had in the real actions and sufferings of Christ. 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 Monophysites. Docetic tendencies have also been developed in later periods of the church's history, as for example by the Priscillianists and the Bogomiles, and also since the Reformation by Jacob Böhme, Menno Simonis, and a small fraction of the Anabaptists.—(Niemeyer De Docetis, Halle, 1823-4.)