The church seems to have known of these Gnostic gospels and rejected them. The documents may actually include some things that Jesus said, but they were rejected because they leave the wrong overall impression of Jesus. Other Gnostics used different arguments to escape from the dilemma of a human Savior. One group insisted that Jesus did not really have a body at all; it was a clever hallucination—the same heavenly ghost idea we saw in Docetism. In any case Gnostics agreed that the Christ could not be human. Thus we have what a modern Christian must think a striking surprise. The first major
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