This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Adoptionism is not one controversy but two, separated by roughly five hundred years and unconnected except by the shared shape of the claim. Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch in the mid third century, taught that the man Jesus was joined to the divine Word by a moral union of will rather than by a real incarnation, effectively becoming Son of God through that indwelling rather than being it from birth. A synod of bishops meeting at Antioch deposed him in 268, in one of the earliest recorded instances of a formal episcopal council settling a doctrinal dispute by removing a bishop from office.
The second episode surfaces in eighth century Spain, under Muslim rule, where the archbishop of Toledo, Elipandus, and the bishop of Urgell, Felix, taught that Christ was Son of God by nature in his eternal divinity but son of God only by adoption in his assumed humanity, a formula meant to safeguard the true humanity of Christ rather than to deny his divinity outright. Charlemagne, extending Frankish influence into the question, called the Council of Frankfurt in 794, which condemned the position, and further councils through the 790s reinforced the ruling. In neither case did the label survive as a live confession; both are read today as attempts, in different centuries and for different reasons, to hold Christ humanity and his divinity together without letting either swallow the other, attempts the wider church judged to have let the humanity swallow too much.