GENESIS THE MIRACLES AND THE PREDICTIONS ACCORDING TO SPIRITISM

67. This idea upon the nature of the body of Jesus is not new. In the fourth century Apollinarius of Laodicea, chief of the sect of the Apollinarists, assumed that Jesus had not taken a body like ours, but one incapable of harm or pain, which had descended from heaven on the breast of the Virgin Saint, and was not born of her, that thus Jesus had been born, had suffered, and was dead only in appearance. The Apollinarists were anathematized at the Council of Alexandria in 360, in that of Rome in 374, and in that of Constantinople in 381.

The Docetists, (from the Greek dokein, to appear), a numerous sect among the Gnostics, had the same belief; this cult subsisted during the first three centuries A.D.