Early in church history there arose a heresy called Gnosticism. According to a basic premise of Gnosticism, physical matter is inherently evil. So to avoid tarnishing Jesus Christ with evil some Gnostics taught that he was a phantom. He only seemed to have a physical body (the doctrine of docetism, so called after the Greek verb dokein, “to seem”). Other Gnostics taught that Christ, a divine spirit, differed from Jesus, a human being with a physical body, and descended on Jesus immediately