Docetae, in the primitive church, the partisans of those doctrines which admitted the appearance but denied the reality of the human form and nature of Jesus Christ. Those who looked upon matter as essentially evil were offended at the idea of a revelation of Deity through sensible objects, and declared that everything corporeal in Christ was only in appearance, and for the manifestation of the spirit, and that his life was merely a continued theophany. It was probably against Docetic doctrines, which had appeared even in the time of the apostles, that some passages in the gospels and epistles of St. John were directed. Docetism, of which there were various forms, was itself one of the earlier forms of Gnosticism, and its teachers, as Valentinus, Cassianus, and Bardesanes, who flourished in the latter half of the 2d century, are reckoned among the Gnostics. Its purpose was to reconcile the narrative of the gospels with the respect due to the Deity, in maintaining that the sufferings and death of Christ were only apparent, in opposition to the realistic doctrine of the Ebionites.