Taking its cue from the story of a Cretan peasant who was reluctant to let go of a handful of his native soil in order to enter heaven, this article begins by exploring ideas concerning the afterlife in which this world is contrasted with the world to come. It then proceeds to discuss how Christians historically have frequently understood themselves to be in the world, but not of it; how dualistic tendencies have often pitted the soul against the body, and how such views have had an influence on how we understand the person of Christ, often preventing Christians from fully accepting the implications of the Incarnation. The article examines instances of a lingering docetic streak within Christianity, which lies uncomfortably with its central claim that God became fully human. Notwithstanding the difficulties some Christians may have with the idea of a fully human Jesus, there is also a very rich tradition within Christianity of bodily engagement with the material world, not only sacramentally, but also within many popular religious practices, including pilgrimage and relic veneration. Finally, the revival of interest in sacred natural sites, even in areas where church attendances continue to fall, is investigated.

This article argues that the quests for the historical Jesus have largely operated with an understanding of history hindered by a severely constricted range of divine and human possibilities. By outlining human ‘self-understanding’ as a historiographical question, it emphasises the determinative role in historical judgement played by the historian's assumptions about the range of possibility available to the processes of human thought. Highlighting three particular concerns that historians tend to connect to ‘docetism’, it suggests a couple of ways that metaphysical and theological forms of reasoning could expand the horizon of possibilities available to historical Jesus scholarship in a way that will augment access to the historical figure of Jesus.

Gnostic studies mainly depended on the Church Fathers' approach to heresies until the discovery of the Coptic Nag Hammadi codices in 1945. As we are slowly moving away from this patristic approach to Gnosticism, docetism is still defined as a tendency to regard Jesus' body as an appearance, and not as a real incarnate body. Irenaeus' refutation of all heresies presents the Valentinian and Basilidian Christologies as clearly docetist. A comparison of direct Valentinian sources such as the Extracts of Theodotus with Valentinian tractates from Nag Hammadi shows on the contrary that Valentinians had a clear notion of the incarnation. As for the Basilidians, the Elenchos of Ps.-Hippolytus, the Second Logos of the Great Seth and the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter can be used to demonstrate that docetism is not the proper category to interpret Basilidian Christology and Soteriology because the purification of the real body of the Saviour lies at the heart of that system.