This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The word docetism comes from the Greek dokein, to seem, and names a tendency rather than a single school. Several early currents that treated matter as unworthy of the divine found it easier to imagine that God only seemed to take a body than that God genuinely entered one, hungered in it, bled in it and died in it.
The earliest clear objection on record is personal rather than academic. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was being taken to Rome around the year 110 to be executed, and in his letter to the church at Smyrna he confronted the idea directly: if Christ suffering was only an appearance, he wrote, then his own coming martyrdom meant nothing either, since he was imitating a Christ who had risked nothing real. The argument is theological but it is also personal, written by a man walking toward the fact he is defending.
Tertullian later took up the same fight against a specific target, Marcion, whose Christology held that Christ flesh was not really human flesh at all, in a work devoted to the question, On the Flesh of Christ. No ecumenical council ever condemned docetism by name, since organized docetic teaching had mostly receded before the councils met, but the Council of Chalcedon definition of 451, confessing Christ as truly God and truly man, in two natures without confusion or division, settled the question doctrinally for the mainstream church without needing to name the earlier position it excluded.