Aphthartodocetism

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As aphthartodocetae (from the Greek. Aphtharton "incorruptible, everlasting") refers to a variety of Monophysitism , which taught the immortality of the body of Jesus. The followers of this Christian denomination were also called Julianists or Gaianites after their founder Julian of Halicarnassus .

Since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, there have been violent disputes within Christianity of late antiquity about the nature of Christ: the councils of the fourth century had established that Jesus was both man and God; now there was a dispute about the relationship between these two natures in Christ. In Chalcedon the Dyophysites had prevailed, who taught that in Jesus the divine and the human existed perfectly and unmixed (“true man and true God at the same time”), while the Monophysites (Miaphysites) assumed a merging of the two natures. For decades this dispute divided Christianity and was carried on with bitterness, since according to the ideas of the time it was crucial to adhere to the correct teaching in order to be able to find salvation.

In early 565, a few months before his death, Emperor Justinian I , actually a long-time advocate of dyophysitism , surprisingly turned to the extreme doctrine, rejected even by the majority of the Monophysites, that the human nature of Christ, like the divine, is immortal and unchangeable insensitive to natural affects (cf. Evag. HE 4,39). With this he provoked resistance from all sides; several stubborn bishops (including Patriarch Eutychios ) were deposed by the emperor. The reasons for the emperor's change of course are in the dark. Justinian's death in November 565 put an end to the controversy and aphthartodocetism was soon forgotten.

literature

  • Kate Adshead: Justinian and Aphthartodocetism . In: Stephen Mitchell, Geoffrey B. Greatrex (Eds.): Ethnicity and culture in Late Antiquity . London 2000, pp. 331-336.
  • Mischa Meier : The other age of Justinian. Experience of contingency and coping with contingency in the 6th century AD , Göttingen 2003, pp. 289–293.
  • Karl-Heinz Uthemann: Emperor Justinian as a church politician and theologian. In: Augustinianum 39, 1999, ZDB -ID 1263528-5 , pp. 5-83.