[Drews misunderstands Gnosticism] the Gnostics of the second century really questioned the historical existence of Jesus by their docetic conception; in other words, they believed only in a metaphysical and ideal, not an historical and real, Christ. The whole polemic of the Christians against the Gnostics was based essentially on the fact that the Gnostics denied the historicity of Jesus, or at least put it in a subordinate position.
This is nonsense. The Docetes admitted to the full that the Messiah had appeared on earth; but, partly to meet the Jewish objections to a crucified Messiah, and partly inspired by that contempt for matter which was and is common in the East, and has been the inspiring motive of much vain asceticism, they shrank from believing that he shared with ordinary men their flesh and blood, their secretions and evacuations. Matter was too evil for a Messiah, much more for the heavenly Logos, to have been encased in it, and so subjected to its dominion; to ascribe real flesh to him was to humble him before the evil Demiurge, who created matter. [Docetes accepted current Christian tradition] The Docetes accordingly took refuge in the idea that his body was a phantom, and that in phantom form he had undergone all that was related of him in Christian tradition; to which their views bear testimony, instead of contradicting it, as Dr. Drews and his friends pretend. "If these things," writes Ignatius, "were done by our Lord in Semblance, then am I also a prisoner in semblance." This means that--mutatis mutandis--the arguments of the Docetes would turn Ignatius too, chains and all, into a phantom. Again and again this writer affirms that the Docetes believed quite correctly that Jesus was born of a virgin and baptized by John, was nailed up for our sakes under Pontius Pilate and Herod the Tetrarch, that he suffered, died, and raised himself up out of the grave. They only would not believe that he underwent and performed all this truly--that is, objectively. They insisted that the Saviour had only been among men as a phantom, in the same manner as Helen had gone through the siege of Troy as a mere phantom. She was not really there, though Greeks and Trojans saw and met her daily. She was all the time enjoying herself amid the asphodel meadows of the Nile. Even so the disciples, according to the Docetes, had heard and seen Jesus all through his ministry; yet the body they saw was phantasmal only. The Docetes also argued--so we can infer from Ignatius's Epistle to the Church of Smyrna--that, as Jesus ate and drank after the resurrection in phantom guise, so he had eaten and drunk before his death in no other than phantom guise. The answer of Ignatius to this is: "I know and believe that he was in the flesh even after the resurrection"; and he forthwith relates how the risen Jesus approached Peter and his company, who thought they were in the presence of a phantom or ghost, and said to them: "Lay hold and handle me, and see that I am not a demon without a body." Everything, then, that we read about the Docetes shows that on all points, in respect of the miraculous incidents of Jesus's life no less than of the natural, they blindly accepted the record of evangelical tradition. Their heresy was not to deny what the tradition related, but to interpret it wrongly. [Docetism in Philo,] Philo had long before set the example of such an interpretation, when in his commentaries, which were widely read by Christians in the second century, he asserted that the angels who appeared to Abraham at the oak of Mambre, and ate and drank with him, only ate and drank in semblance, and not in reality. They laid a spell on the eyes of Abraham, and of the other guests at the banquet. [and in Tobit] So in the Book of Tobit xii, 19, the angel says: "All these days did I appear unto you; and I did neither eat nor drink, but it was a vision ye yourselves saw."