special substance from the spiritual world. This notion that Jesus did not have a real human body is usually called Docetism, from a Greek word that means “to appear” or “to seem”: Jesus seemed to be a human, with a physical human body, but this was mere appearance. He did not eat; or, if he did, it was not because he needed sustenance, but rather to keep the fiction that he was truly human. Some Docetists claimed that Jesus was not born but simply appeared, so to speak, “out of thin air.” Marcion