Adoptionists Quotes
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WE HAVE SEEN THAT those holding adoptionist views of Christ claimed to represent the earliest views of Jesus’s own apostles .. Docetic views, when first we meet them, appear to have emerged out of incarnation Christologies later in the first century—but still during the times of the New Testament.
Bart Ehrman
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The adoptionists were right to affirm that Jesus was human but wrong to deny that he was God; the docetists were right to affirm that Jesus was divine but wrong to deny that he was human; the Gnostics were right to affirm that Christ was both divine and human but wrong to deny that he was a single being.
And so, if you put together all the orthodox affirmations, the result is the ortho-paradox: Christ is God; Christ is a man; but he is one being, not two. This became the standard Christological affirmation of the orthodox tradition.
As we will see, this did not settle the issue of who Christ was for the orthodox. It instead led to more questions, and “false beliefs” continued to propagate—not against any of the standard orthodox claims, but against various ways of understanding these claims. As time went on, heresies became increasingly detailed, and the orthodox affirmations became increasingly paradoxical.
Bart Ehrman
