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they regarded his doctrine of the Logos as in conflict with the rest of the New Testament, also
saw in Jesus a mere man, though miraculously born of a virgin, and taught that Christ
descended on Him at baptism, conferring on Him supernatural powers. In the main this was
also the position of the Dynamic Monarchians. Paul of Samosata, its main representative,
distinguished between Jesus and the Logos. He regarded the former as a man like every other
man, born of Mary, and the latter, as the impersonal divine reason, which took up its abode in
Christ in a pre-eminent sense, from the time of His baptism, and thus qualified Him for His great
task. In view of this denial it was part of the task of the early Apologetes to defend the doctrine
of the deity of Christ.
If there were some who sacrificed the deity to the humanity of Christ, there were others who
reversed the order. The Gnostics were profoundly influenced by the dualistic conception of the
Greeks, in which matter as inherently evil is represented as utterly opposed to spirit; and by a
mystic tendency to regard earthly things as allegorical representations of great cosmic
redeeming processes. They rejected the idea of an incarnation, a manifestation of God in a
visible form, since it involved a direct contact of spirit with matter. Harnack says that the
majority of them regarded Christ as a Spirit consubstantial with the Father. According to some
He descended upon the man Jesus at the time of His baptism, but left Him again before His
crucifixion; while according to others He assumed a merely phantasmal body. The Modalistic
Monarchians also denied the humanity of Christ, partly in the interest of His deity, and partly to
preserve the unity of the Divine Being. They saw in Him merely a mode or manifestation of the
one God, in whom they recognized no distinction of persons. The Anti-Gnostic and Alexandrian
Fathers took up the defense of the deity of Christ, but in their defense did not altogether
escape the error of representing Him as subordinate to the Father. Even Tertullian taught a
species of subordination, but especially Origen, who did not hesitate to speak of a
subordination as to essence. This became a steppingstone for Arianism, in which Christ is
distinguished from the Logos as the divine reason, and is represented as a pre-temporal,
superhuman creature, the first of the creatures, not God and yet more than man. Athanasius
took issue with Arius, and strongly defended the position that the Son is consubstantial with,
and of the same essence as, the Father, a position that was officially adopted by the council of
Nicea in 321. Semi-Arianism proposed a via media by declaring the Son to be of a similar
essence as the Father.
When the doctrine of the deity of the Son was officially established, the question naturally
arose as to the relation in which the two natures in Christ stand to each other. Apollinaris
offered a solution of the problem. Accepting the Greek trichotomic conception of man as
consisting of body, soul, and spirit, he took the position that the Logos took the place of the
spirit (pneuma) in man, which he regarded as the seat of sin. His chief interest was to secure