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Standing at the opposite end of the theological spectrum from the Jewish-Christian Ebionites and their adoptionistic Christology were groups of Christians known as docetists.5 The name comes from the Greek word DOKEŌ, which means “to seem” or “to appear.”
Probably the best-known docetist from the early centuries of Christianity was the philosopher-teacher Marcion.
For Marcion, this contrast between the gospel of Christ and the Law of Moses was absolute, so much so that the God who gave the Law obviously could not be the one who gave the salvation of Christ. They were, in other words, two different gods.
Cf pg 33-34
The King James Version is filled with places in which the translators rendered a Greek text derived ultimately from Erasmus’s edition, which was based on a single twelfth-century manuscript that is one of the worst of the manuscripts that we now have available to us!
The King James was not given by God but was a translation by a group of scholars in the early seventeenth century who based their rendition on a faulty Greek text.
And there are some places in which modern translations continue to transmit what is probably not the original text (so I’ve argued for Mark 1:41; Luke 22:43–44; and Heb. 2:9, for example; there are other instances as well).
Luke himself indicates that he had read and used earlier accounts in coming up with his own (1:1–4). On the other hand, this means that it is possible to compare what Mark says with what Matthew and/or Luke say, in any story shared between them; and by doing so, one can see how Mark was changed by these later authors.
