I don’t want to make this an issue about trinitarianism; it is to my mind simply a matter of literary-historical perspective. Seriously. But what was the author of the Johannine letters—let’s call him John—getting at when he warned that “many deceivers went out into the world, those not confessing Jesus Christ coming in flesh” (2 Jn. 7*)?

He is concerned about the harmful influence of certain “false prophets” or secessionists who were once associated with the core Johannine fellowship: “They went out from us but they were not from us, for if they were from us, they would have remained always with us” (1 Jn. 2:19*; 4:1). On the face of it, it appears that these people denied the incarnation: the coming of Jesus in flesh, in that sense. The pre-existent divine Jesus only seemed to have become human—a heresy that became known as docetism.