WAS THE

RESURRECTION

A HALLUCINATION?

THE DEVIL PROVES IT CAN’T BE PROVED

THE REFUTATION FROM FAITH

THE RISEN CHRIST – A DAYDREAM?

SUBJECTIVE HALLUCINATIONS

VERIDICAL HALLUCINATIONS

HYPNOPOMPIC HALLUCINATIONS

HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS

The Church denies that the apostles and the other witnesses hallucinated or imagined the appearances of Jesus Christ following his death that led them to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Yet the same Church recognises that a deep psychological need can cause such visions and claims that the visionaries had a strong need for Jesus to be alive. There is no evidence against the hallucination explanation and it is simpler to accept it than to accept that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

Christians go through psychiatric manuals and consult "experts" to try and get evidence that the witnesses of the resurrection didn't hallucinate the resurrection appearances. But what if the hallucinations took place under some kind of supernatural or psychic influence? If you accept the supernatural you have to admit that possibility. So in that case the manuals and psychiatrists are no help.

THE DEVIL PROVES IT CAN’T BE PROVED

If there is a Devil who has the power to make people hallucinate then how can we be sure of that Jesus really was seen after he rose from the dead?

If there is a Devil then the resurrection cannot be proved for he might have raised a good man called Jesus from the dead for an evil purpose. The Christian claim that only God can raise the dead is just an assumption and when the Bible says God lets the Devil kill and that the Devil is a murderer why can’t he let the Devil raise the dead? They know they are skating on thin ice.

No matter how strong the evidence for resurrection is, there is stronger evidence that it could not have happened. Jesus supported the Jewish Law though it said that God commanded the murder of adulterers, apostates and heretics by stoning. No good God would raise a man like that from the dead to promote such fanatical preaching. The Bible attributes miracles to the Devil and says he likes to pretend to be a messenger of God. If the Devil raised Jesus then he might just as easily have made the body of Jesus invisible in the tomb and caused the witnesses to miraculously hallucinate that the tomb was empty and that Jesus had appeared and got them to take the body away and then wiped their memories so we would have no evidence for saying a resurrection took place. Or perhaps the Devil simply looked at what evidence there was for what in that great time of turbulence and considered what he could get away with and worked out from it what to say about Jesus and tricked people to believe that the evidence said Jesus rose from the dead and appeared, by manipulating the evidence. He would not have raised Jesus when it was easier to do a few magic tricks to make it seem that he had returned from the dead. And the fruits of Christianity have been a vulgar hypocrisy and crass error and an endless stream of deaths and wars which would back up the diabolical agency explanation. Any good Christianity has done could and would have been done without it so the good fruits are irrelevant. Jesus himself said that you know false prophets by their fruits. But one would need to be God to see if Christianity really had more good fruits than bad so that was not very honest of him. And what about religions that have just as many or more good fruits? What if the Devil plans to bring about much good that is so well planned that the greater badness is unknown? What if he makes the resurrection do good for the world so that the ripples of the event will throw world events in such an order that some big future disaster will take place?

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THE REFUTATION FROM FAITH

The Early Church put such a bizarre stress on irrational faith that it is possible that if the resurrection was hallucinated the reason was because the faith the Church sought was a hallucination. They held it was more important to believe in the resurrection than to see Jesus risen so faith was behind it all and all the way.

Jesus in Mark, the earliest gospel says something very very interesting. Jesus cursed a fig tree and later it was found withered. “And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursed is withered away. And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God. For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed and casted into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them” (Mark 11:21-24).

Jesus taught that faith is necessary for miracles and it must be extremely strong faith indeed. And it can do stupendous miracles.

Jesus’ miracles then boasted Jesus’ faith. They glorified his faith. He did them to show his own faith and to show off. Miracles do not happen because they should or because they are needed but because of the faith of the miracle-worker.

Also, Jesus was advocating miracles just as acts of showing off. Had he advocated miracles as acts of love that temporarily change nature he would have used the example of, “That whosoever shall say to the cancer disappear right now and let this man life and it will be done.” Christians say he was only using an extreme example about the mountain to illustrate the power of prayer which can move mountains if God so wills. They claim that he was not saying you should try and move mountains by prayer. But most people run after miracles out of fascination at their magic and Jesus was speaking to ordinary men and not theologians. He meant what he said.

He said that if you pray and believe the prayer is already answered it will be answered. This is magic. It is about controlling God. Jesus thinks that God will do whatever you want if you have enough faith.

Miracles are not signs calling you to faith. They are signs of faith in the miracle-worker. They show how much he believes and how great he is. They do not bring real glory to God. Jesus is saying that if you believe properly and without doubting you will be able to do miracles so miracles cannot bring anybody else to proper faith in God for few can do miracles.

Miracles do not support belief in the power of God but belief in the power of faith.

In this light, if Jesus came back from the dead the return was occultic. It was occultism brought him back. If you make your faith strong enough it will lead you to the conviction that you saw Jesus and spoke with him after his death in a vision. The first account of Jesus’ words supersedes anything that came later. Mark is the oldest gospel so we must listen to it when it refutes the Christian idea that the resurrection of Jesus was a holy miracle that brought honour to God.

Paul is more important than any gospeller for he was writing closer to Jesus than they were so no matter how accurate the gospellers may be Paul’s beliefs about Jesus have more weight for we have no reason to doubt him. And the foundation of Paul’s theology was the idea that faith is not caused by our natural reason and feelings but by God. Paul was certainly accepted as a true witness to the resurrection of Jesus by the apostles so they must have agreed about faith for it was a very basic issue.

When the Bible says that faith is not from ourselves but from God and so is the gift of God it follows that evidence does not cause faith but faith is God testifying to you and revealing to you. For example, instead of one working out like a detective that Jesus rose again one has to experience God and experience that God is telling one that the resurrection is true. Then why do people think that God has told them stuff and then found that they were wrong and that God couldn’t have told them? If God gave evidence it would be churlish and sinful and unreasonable to ignore it in favour of what you think he is telling you. The early Christians then were unduly gullible or biased or both and it is pure arrogance to say that God has told you x, y and z instead of looking at the evidence then you are really exalting your own thinking over God for a good God would be pro-evidence and pro-reason. They needed witnesses to the resurrection not so that they could believe in the resurrection but that God could witness to those who hear what the witnesses say and that God could witness internally to the witnesses that what they saw and heard was from him. This was how they answered the theological problem of saying you listen to God when you listen to people who say they speak for God which is not the same as listening to God. It is like when Paul said that no man could sincerely call Jesus Lord except by the power of the Holy Spirit. So man needs God to provide the help so man cannot do it on his own. He means those who have belief and no faith yet as well as those who have both for belief happens first and then it becomes faith when coupled with repentance. This is a denial that any other evidence was important. If it was not important then it probably never existed for it would be immoral to ignore it.

Everything in this chapter is compatible with efforts made in the Bible to provide evidence but the evidence alone was not what was important. God had to testify internally that the evidence was there and was interpreted right so the faith was not based on evidence but on the divine testimony. This is no better than the claim of the Mormon to have a supernatural internal testimony of the Holy Spirit that the Book of Mormon is true.

The Devil must have been behind the resurrection reports if he existed.

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THE RISEN CHRIST – A DAYDREAM?

Seeing and hearing things in your imagination has always counted as a real way of getting communications from God. The Old and New Testaments say that God talks to you in your heart.

St Theresa of Avila stated that God can give you visions and locutions in your imagination in her book, Foundations. (See quote in Mother of Nations by Joan Ashton, page 147).

Perhaps, the witnesses to the risen Jesus saw him and heard him that way. This would seem to fit only some visions of Jesus. The appearance of Jesus to Thomas to let him feel him would see to be one exception. Therein Jesus told Thomas to doubt no longer but believe. But then you can touch things in your imagination. If your imagination is being used by God to bestow visions then the touching is real. The gospel says that Thomas didn’t believe before the appearance of Jesus. Jesus didn’t tell him to disbelieve no more but to doubt no more. This would suggest that Thomas had periods of belief which he later doubted.

You cannot say that the resurrection visions were not in the imagination on the grounds that there is no biblical evidence for that. But then the Bible does not explain in what way the visions came about. The apostles would not have been the first to undergo suffering for what they felt God was making them sense in their mind’s eye or imagination. Most of the biblical characters had done the same. The fanatical Christian today is doing the same for they can‘t tell you why they believe in any really rational or well-thought out sense. Yet they would die and cause a lot of trouble for their faith.

The early Church arbitrarily and shamelessly bragged that its charisms or miraculous powers like speaking gibberish were from God and those of other cults were demonic. It was capable of depending on creative visualisation as a vehicle of revelation.

Mormons suffer for their religion and it is based not on evidence though Mormons say there is evidence but on feeling that their religion is true and they think this feeling is a revelation from God. Why should the apostles have been any different with their feeling and daydreams?

When Peter said that we must trust the Scriptures even more that we should trust the voice of God if we hear it from Heaven for the Scriptures give a more sure way of revelation from God (1 Peter 1:21) then it follows that the Bible is more convincing than visions and revelations. This tells us that empty tombs and Jesus appearing is not enough but only the Old Testament and its predicting of the resurrection matters. The tomb and the visions might only be important for making us see what the Old Testament means but they are not the basis for belief in the resurrection. Only the prophets are. This is an admission from an alleged witness of the resurrected Jesus that the visions and stuff did not matter. It tells us that the apostles might have believed in the resurrection on the basis of a new interpretation of the Old Testament and claimed that it did not matter how silly or unbelievable their visions were. This makes the resurrection less credible for those who are dissatisfied with their interpretation. It also shows that they were unreliable and made themselves believe things that did not make sense for nobody in their honest and right mind would be content with their interpretation. 1 Peter rejects any attempt to make it look as if Jesus performed miracle signs so it bids us not to pay any attention to the gospels which do exactly that. The miracles would detract from the duty to depend only on the Old Testament and apostolic doctrine. Using the resurrection then to verify that the Bible is true which is a game played by many fundamentalists does not work and is quite illegitimate. So when Peter the rock weakens our faith in the resurrection the other apostles would have even a more damning effect.

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SUBJECTIVE HALLUCINATIONS

Did the women and the apostles have visions that originated in their own minds, subjective hallucinations?

Christians who object to the hallucination hypothesis ignore the developments regarding hallucinations these days. It is now known that even bad eyesight can cause hallucinations for it causes the brain to mix up what it sees with what is in the part of the brain that takes care of fantasising. The book on reincarnation Mind out of Time by Ian Wilson shows that the picture of hallucinations that Christians make out is a misinterpretation based on refusal to look into the subject properly. All that matters to them is fooling people.

It is now known that the way we in the west are conditioned makes us less likely to have visual hallucinations while these types of hallucination were encouraged in New Testament times (Craig’s Empty Tomb and Habermas on the Post-Resurrection Appearances of Jesus).

It is dishonest how the Christians are so keen to eliminate hallucination from the flimsy gospel data about the resurrection while there are scores of more detailed cases in the annals of the Catholic Church in which several people at a time saw the Virgin Mary and got messages from her and were still found to be deluded though they seemed to see the same thing – usually what happened was a leader was shaping the things they thought they could see and hear.

Hillyer Straton stated that people who have hallucinations do not become martyrs for them (page 248, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1) and dedicate their lives to preaching them (page 255, ibid). But this assumes that the apostles died for their visions and there is no evidence for this. If they died for Christianity that is not the same as dying for visions. Plenty gave their lives for Christianity without having visions or intending to die to verify the apostles’ visions or even thinking of doing so, therefore why should we be surprised if the apostles died for delusional visions? Many ghosts are hallucinations and their witnesses can swear they are real and tell everybody. If they can take them seriously some can take them even more seriously. If the visions were wacky the apostles would have been in the right mental state to blame and excitement and confusion for bizarre elements with the result that they would be dismissed as being incapable of refuting the visions. Memories of exciting visions can be unintentionally changed and improved over time so that they can eventually seem more persuasive and real than they actually were. Memories are selective and there is no evidence that the apostles made any effort to ensure theirs would not do this. The apostles might have attributed the wacky bits to the Devil and accepted the better bits as real especially if the tomb was inexplicably found empty. The tomb could have been the reason they founded a faith on their visions for the tomb could have been thought to prove the visions. People suffer for different kinds of hallucinatory experiences such as visions of ghosts and things. Many will call them liars or mad. If people want the hallucination to be real badly enough then they can remember what they want to remember and believe.

Only people with great imaginations and who are nervous can hallucinate and it is asserted that the apostles were not like this (page 248). This is an incredible suggestion if the apostles had been having strange religious experiences all along and if Jesus said they were nervous cowards like the gospels report. Also, Jesus told the Jews that the sign of Jonah, his return from death, would be his only sign meaning the rest were not that convincing. We are told they were scared for their lives at the time of the alleged resurrection. And this fear was irrational if they had really been allowed to get away in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The fact that the Gospels say that the visionaries had different moods, Magdalene was crying, Peter felt guilty and Thomas scoffed the resurrection, is supposed to make a hallucination unlikely (page 249). But they still could have a desperate wish for Jesus to come back which was fuelled to hallucination point when the tomb was found empty. Nobody is saying that they would have had only these moods. We are not told exactly what they felt or thought during their visions. Also, Magdalene could have cried with guilt and Thomas could have scoffed the resurrection out of guilt so we could have them sharing the same mood as Peter. The Christians are so crafty when they use the argument that they had different moods for the logic is terrible.

It is hard to believe that lots of people would see the same man. Hallucinations come from the subconscious mind so suggestion might have happened to program the mind to hallucinate the same man. These people had been trained to mediate on Jesus and put him first which conditioned their minds. They all wanted to see the same man. They might have seen Jesus in different forms and slightly different times. Perhaps Magdalene saw Jesus as a blonde clean-shaven youth and the rest saw him as he looked in life. You never know. The gospels seem to say he could alter his looks. The Womb and the Tomb (page 156) informs us that a group of people can have the same subjective hallucination. One person's vision colours and shapes the ones the others have in such cases. It has been known. Often the memory of the experience is altered when the person hears the leader of the group the one who has the most emotional control and clout describing his version and they think they saw much the same thing. The subconscious mind picks up many things we cease to be aware of and can be lying waiting for a trigger to make you see what somebody else says they see.

The disbelief that accompanied some of the visions suggests that they believed they were seeing things. But be careful, if you think that disbelief blocks the visions. You could have them seeing Jesus then momentarily disbelieving causing him to vanish and him reappearing again with the restoration of their previous mental state. It is never said Jesus was visible when they disbelieved.

Hallucinations of a deceased are normally triggered by the places and things associated with them when the person really wants to see them (page 252). It is said that this trigger was missing in the women and the apostles’ situation. There is no evidence that it was or that it wasn’t. But if Jesus was buried in the Garden of Gethsemane and if the apostles were in places they associated with him that would explain a lot. But hearing of the tomb being empty could have stirred up the feelings that are preparatory to a hallucination. It is the feelings that count not the surroundings. Hallucinations can take place without things associated with the deceased through things that remind you of or look like those things.

Hallucinations can be triggered by time as well. A woman might see her dead husband at 5:30 pm if that was the time he came home from work every day. Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol (page 252) dishonestly tells us that Jesus was seen at different times. But if you read the gospels you will see that Jesus may have appeared only in the mornings to the women and the apostles as well except one time to the apostles that John says was evening. The two men going to Emmaus saw him in the evening but they were not of these two groups and could have tended to see him then. We could have merely two different times which fails to disprove hallucination for a woman can see her dead husband at 5:30 and again in the bathroom at 9 am if he was in the habit of shaving then. Also, two different groups can hallucinate at different times.

Most of the Jesus visions could have been over very quickly. Hallucinations tend to be glimpses (page 252, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1). Jesus says a few sentences in some visions and eats fish in Luke. But were the witnesses led to think that he said these things to them spiritually or kind of telepathically after momentarily appearing? Were the sayings merely impressions they got and which they felt inspired to put into words? Many mystics claiming to hear the voice of God claim that it is up to them to put the revelations into words.

Hallucinations are contagious so perhaps each person did not see him exactly at the same time. The messages say that Jesus’ death and resurrection were prophesied in the Old Testament and that he should be preached. But a person who had lost Jesus in death thinking about the meaning of the vision would come to these conclusions and take them as divine inspiration. The apostles could have hallucinated Jesus eating the bit of fish which Luke says they gave him. Giving the fish need not mean it was handed to him. Perhaps, they did not notice that the pieces of fish on the table were not one down after this or thought he miraculously replaced the bit he took. Or perhaps they thought a piece of fish was missing in the excitement and concluded that Jesus took it. It was an emotional and therefore insane time for them.

Commentators say Luke says they did not believe what they were seeing for joy. But Luke actually says they did not believe for joy after Jesus showing them his hands and his feet. Evidently, they could believe they saw him but not that he had the wounds. What was so joyful about the wounds was that it made them sure it was Jesus.

Christians usually misread it to say that it was Jesus being they couldn’t believe for joy. Did not believe for joy does not imply that despite their joy they couldn’t literally believe. It is just an idiom. It is just like you would tell a person you cannot believe they look so good which does not mean you really believe they look ugly!

He could have been thought to have led them out to Bethany invisibly and reappeared there. Perhaps only one person saw him there and told the rest what was happening. Notice how Matthew, Mark and John do not say that Jesus was seen going to Heaven. He might have went up in the cloud without being seen. The messages in Acts 1 are not said to have been transmitted by a visible Jesus. It says they were watching as he was lifted up and taken away in a cloud. Perhaps they thought they could make out a man in fog. It is easy to see shapes in fog. And if they had been convinced by their own or others hallucinations that he was alive they would have thought the man was Jesus especially if they were being manipulated to get the same divine messages in the heart the way charismatics get them.

One objection against hallucination is that the men going to Emmaus walked with a man they did not know and who they later realised was Jesus and Magdalene mistook Jesus for the gardener and some of the apostles did not know Jesus when they saw him in Galilee. You only hallucinate people you know. In Emmaus, it is not said why the men thought it was Jesus. It could have been one of those silly strange ideas that religious people can get. Perhaps they walked with a preacher man. Perhaps one of them had a hallucination that altered his memory of the event so that he came to believe that the man had been revealed to him as Jesus at the end of their walk and when he broke bread and he convinced the other man. Both men admitted that when they listened to the man their hearts burned with joy inside them which suggests that they were drifting towards the right mentality for a hallucination or persuading themselves that they saw Jesus when they hadn’t. The joy was not natural after what they had been through. It could be that their feelings warped their memories so that they came to believe the man was Jesus when he broke bread. He probably left then because he thought they were mad. Magdalene could have went to the Gardener and wished him to be Jesus so that she had a vision that he was Jesus. There could have been a man in Galilee dressed like Jesus who went away and the next time the apostles looked they saw a hallucination of Jesus dressed the same way and assumed that it was Jesus the whole time. The Gospel does not prove that it was Jesus all along.

Val Grieve rejects the hallucination explanation for the appearances of Jesus on the grounds that the witnesses did not expect to see Jesus (page 14, Verdict on the Empty Tomb). The apostles not believing the women that Jesus had appeared does not prove the apostles did not expect to see him. Doubting Thomas might have felt he could see Jesus though his head told him he wouldn’t and the feelings and the need brought about the hallucination. The heart is what causes the head to hallucinate. However, despite Grieve, the gospels do not say that nobody expected to see Jesus.

Professor Kevan had a problem with the hallucinations stopping so abruptly and at the same time. This makes him think they were not hallucinations but real (page 255, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1). But the feelings that caused the people to imagine all they saw would have been satiated by the visions causing them to stop eventually. The apostles came to believe that Jesus was with them even if they could not always see him and that satisfied them. Jesus told them he would never leave them meaning spiritually and personally when he left them bodily which could have been physiological trigger that ended the visions. And they went on for forty days which is a long time though that does not mean Jesus appeared often or spent much time with them. They could have gone on after this time. Remember how Paul reportedly had visions much later.

If Jesus appeared a lot then it could be that the gospels selected the most believable visions out of the quagmire of visionary ramblings. If hallucinations happen a lot then chances are that some of them will be credible. There is no evidence against this so the Christians should not be twisting the facts to tell us that the evidence has Jesus having risen from the dead.

Val Grieve states that delusion visions usually get worse over a long period while the apostles’ stopped after forty days (page 14). But maybe these people had been having visions on and off before it came to a head after the supposed resurrection. But did they stop? The New Testament never says that they did though it does perhaps see the ascension as a cut off point for the major revelation.

The ascension is about Jesus going back up to Heaven after the resurrection. Yet it makes little sense. If Jesus rose where was he when he wasn’t appearing? He must have been in Heaven. The Church says he enjoyed the presence of God fully which is what Heaven is all about, since he rose. So even if he appeared on earth he was still in the Heavenly state. Religion says that Heaven is more a state of fulfilment not just a place. So what was the point of the ascension when Jesus was already in Heaven then? The dubious ascension – plus Jesus going up to Heaven as if Heaven is up above the clouds – makes the resurrection dubious too.

It is hard not to think that the secondary purpose of the ascension theologically was to make it clear that the important revelations to the apostles were over which did not mean he couldn’t pop back occasionally later on.

Kevan there is no proof that the hallucinations stopped abruptly at the one time. You are lying.

Assuming the ascension was the cut off point, then it gets interesting. Matthew and Mark have the ascension on the day of resurrection which fits Luke who has the ascension after forty days only if the ascension did not mean a final disappearance. Some would understand this to be a contradiction and others would say there is no need to hold that in Matthew and Mark what was reported was the final vision. That is not the conclusion you get from the words Jesus used. He talks like it’s a farewell and that he is comforting them for a future without his visible presence.

Montifiore admits that two of the visions of Jesus could have been subjective visions, meaning the vision to Paul near Damascus and the vision to the 500 plus Paul mentioned (The Womb and the Tomb, page 157). But he says this is not true of the rest for the witnesses were not overstressed or expecting to see Jesus (page 157). And they had to be overstressed and believed they could meet the same fate as Jesus. There is absolutely no proof that nobody expected to see visions.

As Paul wrote that 500 + saw Jesus at the one time, this is taken as evidence that they were not hallucinating. If people delude themselves that a vision is happened they do not all see it at once. One sees it and then another says he sees it and the others come along and see nothing but convince themselves they are seeing something. But Paul only meant that they were all together when they saw Jesus. If you say John and Bert died at the same time years ago you mean they died perhaps in the same week not that they died at 13 hours 11 minutes and 3 seconds on a specific date. Paul would not have meant to have been taken so literally.

Christians contradict themselves all the time and their dishonesty shines clearly from the fact that they claim that angels were reported at the tomb. If the women did think they seen angels that would have made them expect to see Jesus and fulfil the expectation necessary for causing a hallucination. The apostles might have disbelieved the women at the start but then they could have developed the hope and expectation necessary to make them hallucinate as well. Studies have shown that up to 14% of people who have no mental illness have had hallucinations with some involving more than one of the senses and some having a chat with the hallucination. The figure has to be higher for there has to be people who have hallucinations and never noticed that they hallucinated and many people on a lifeboat at sea have been seen to have a hallucination of a ship coming to save them that is so similar to what the rest see for they want to believe what they see is real and so the delusion fits what most of them describe to fulfil that need once they start talking about what they see so they seem to be having the same hallucination (Craig’s Empty Tomb and Habermas on the Post-Resurrection Appearances of Jesus).

Stress could have triggered the visions and could have altered their memories so much that they came to believe that they had seen Jesus though they had not. The Resurrection Factor would reject this for the visions brought joy and comfort (page 43). But how long did this joy last – two seconds? The gospels do not tell us.

John Drane in Jesus and the Four Gospels, page 78, writes that Paul had a vision on the way to Damascus that he said made him equal to the other apostles. Drane says that Paul did not attribute the same importance to his other visions meaning that the Damascus one was the most obviously authentic and decisive. But Paul never said that. He stressed the Damascus vision for it was the first and most important one and not because it was the one he found most convincing. It was his ordination as an apostle so to speak. He only says there is nothing to be gained by boasting about his visions (2 Corinthians 12) and that is to demonstrate humility and to shame the prideful false apostles. He is not saying the visions are unconvincing or insignificant.

Ian Wilson thinks that Jesus might have used hypnosis to make the eleven see him after his death and tells an anecdote to show how convincing and solid a man who is not there but is just a vision brought about by hypnosis can be (page 120, 121, Jesus: The Evidence). Some cults did use hypnosis so Jesus might have used it too. The visions Stephen had and the vision of Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:1-4 could be descriptions of hypnotic illusions.

The Aquileian Basilica mosaic from before 330 AD shows that the early Christians did collect hallucinogenic mushrooms and ate snails that had been fed on them so that the drug in the mushrooms would not make them sick so that they could enjoy the holy visions and have few or no side-effects. The mosaic shows the mushrooms in a basket. Irenaeus complained about the Christian Gnostic Churches using hallucinogenic substances. There are early icons with pictures of mushrooms and snails on them indicating that the Christians like Siberian Shamans used these things to have visions and revelations from Heaven. The Church was doing these things at the time of Celsus and Origen too.

Nothing makes the Christians tell more lies and present speculation as evidence than the hallucination hypothesis. The theory is unrefuted therefore it takes priority to the supernatural visions of a truly risen man idea.

The view that God can give genuine revelations through mental illness and mushrooms and hallucinations is correct enough but God cannot give original revelation through these channels. He cannot reveal the resurrection of Jesus to apostles who are mad for then nobody knows if it was real or from Heaven or not. But he can reveal to mad people through their illness that the message he gave to sane people is true. So he can only use them to draw attention to what has already been revealed.

It must be a sin to believe that hallucinations that mimic reality are possible if Christianity is true. It must also be a sin to believe that if a group hallucinates, their hallucination will be so influenced by the stories the others are telling that they remember it all differently from the way it really happened. (People hallucinate in relation to memory all the time – like witnesses seeing the same event and reporting different details.) They will eventually seem to have seen the same thing and heard the same words. It must be a sin for the gospels could be describing this kind of delusion and we are not allowed to think or suspect they are. So much for religion being compatible with science.

It is possible that just like devout Catholics telling you they know by spiritual insight and experience that when they take communion they get the body of Jesus himself that the experience of the apostles was something similar but such an experience can hardly be equated with a hallucination for they just perceive what they condition themselves to perceive. It may be incorrect to stress the hallucination theory of the resurrection appearances too much. Perhaps the resurrection appearances were something similar to what these Catholics report. These Catholics are saying they have experienced Jesus as a risen saviour as much as the apostles would have or might have.

The Christians have a nerve when they say that it is unlikely that the apostles had a delusion, dream or hallucination when they saw Jesus.

First, it is possible that they had a vague hallucination of Jesus appearing to them and promising them perhaps just by implication and by the fact that there were loose ends to be tied up that there would be more revelations which led them to believe that their imagination and perceptions that Jesus was communicating with them comprised these subsequent revelations.

Second, the main witness Peter is described in Acts 12 as seeing an angel getting him out of jail. King Herod had imprisoned Peter to please the Jews who were delighted with the execution of Jesus' disciple James. The angel, it is related, appears in the cell and fills it with light. The angel taps Peter on the side to waken him up. He makes the chains fall off him. Then he tells him to get his belt and sandals and put them on. Next Peter is told to put his cloak on and cover up well. He then walked all the way out of the jail to safety outside. Acts says that Peter had no idea that this was real for "he thought he was having a vision". They had walked to the end of a street when the angel vanished and it was then we are told that "Peter came to himself and said to himself, "Now I know that this is all true. The Lord really did send his angel to me to save me." So Peter was being totally oblivious to the fact that this was really happening. Peter then did not trust his visions totally. We are talking here about a very coherent vision not like a dream. Dreams are silly. Peter walked a long way with the angel before he believed that the vision was real and Acts tells us that it was then that he came to himself. We are talking about Peter experiencing the angel for what must amount up to a half an hour at least. We are talking about Peter who supposedly had visions of Jesus risen from the dead and many other visions and he acts as if this vision in the prison cell was the first vision he ever got! Maybe he lied about his Jesus visions or the gospels are lying that he had these Jesus visions.

Peter suspected that there was something wrong when he was having his visions. No matter how long and how real they seemed he thought they could be hallucinations. His suspicions were very strong when he was so hard to convince that his visions were real. Peter must have been having visions that he didn't believe in.

He also believed that his seeing and hearing the angel was unreal meaning he did not trust his visions or the messages from Heaven that touched his ears. When the leader of the pack of visionaries felt that way what does that say about them and how he felt about their visions and experiences?

Peter would have noticed things like most of us do, things that we just turn a blind eye to. Say people have free will. If they do they deserve blessings and or punishments. I am about to lose a vast fortune. Some person does something, foil robbers or something, that results in me keeping it. I would have lost all the money without that person. That person is entitled to half the money in justice for that is what he or she deserves. But the Church never supported this view which shows that it invents its love and its justice and twists everything so a religion that opposes love and justice as it must see them is hardly likely to be a channel of real revelations from a good God. As deniers of free will, we don’t accept that half of what is gained must be parted with. It is safe to assume that when people are so hypocritical that they lie about having the power to give beneficial revelations from Heaven.

Paul is the only person who wrote down his claim that he saw the risen Jesus. Paul in his writings showed signs of religious madness: "The appointed time has been winding down and it has grown very short. From now on, let even those who have wives be as if they had none. And those who weep and mourn as though they were not weeping and mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they did not possess anything. And those who deal with this world as though they were not absorbed by it and as if they had no dealings with it. For the outward form of this world (the present world order) is passing away" (1 Corinthians 7:29-32). The incoherence is plain. For example, he asks those who should be mourning not to do it and then expects others to mourn who should not be doing it. It is not like he considers mourning or not mourning to be a block when you are preparing for the coming of Christ to end the world. A man like that who predicts the end of the world as if it is just days away and who asks for bizarre behaviour in preparation for it is definitely mentally disturbed. His visions cannot be relied on or his reports of them cannot be relied on. He would not be giving a command like that and would not be able to get people to obey it unless he claimed he had been told all this in a vision of Jesus! Even if he really did have visions, the visions lied and so we are entitled to put them down as tricks of the psychic powers of the mind or indeed from Satan if we wish. It would be blasphemous to take his visions seriously for it would not be very dignifying for God if we did that.

People who reject the hallucination hypothesis should recognise that experimental research has been done to verify how psycho-social forces can make a group reporting a weird experience conform in all essentials (Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 4, No 3). They fall into illusion because they have deep rooted psychological needs that need these illusions. You can explain people seeing a Jesus who never rose again and who was only in their minds without having them being subject to hallucinations.

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VERIDICAL HALLUCINATIONS

Did the women and the apostles hallucinate the appearances of Jesus veridically?

These hallucinations are caused by knowing and being close to the person who appears and are said to be caused by telepathy. It is a hallucination caused by anther mind so to speak.

Hugh Montifiore in The Womb and the Tomb (page 157), says that though a group cannot have the same hallucination the person having one can spread it to others and the sense of touch can be deluded to make them think they have touched the dead person. And you can see a person you don’t recognise at first. It is easier to hold that if Jesus appeared then it was not him but a hallucination he or something put into the minds of the visionaries. The Gospels and Jesus erred in thinking that visions could and would prove the resurrection. However, Hugh thinks the visions of Jesus were not veridical for they happened too often and changed the lives of the apostles making eager missionaries of them (page 159). But a veridical hallucination would make some people tend to have subjective hallucinations afterwards or mistake their imagination for a new vision. You could have had some members of the group having visions that the others could not see for it is not said Jesus was seen by all at the places where he appeared all the time. Jesus might not have appeared very much and many of the things that he said might have been heard though a sense of prophecy so there was no need for a lot of visions. Some of these visions could have been revelations in dreams. It was the Pentecost hallucination or whatever, not the resurrection that changed the apostles. I am sick of Christian lies saying it was the resurrection when even their Bible does not say so.

They don’t want it to be Pentecost for there was an outbreak of phenomena that need not have been supernatural. Dubious charismatic groups create zealots all the time.

Also, a veridical hallucination of a person claiming to be a special prophet from God could have a life-changing effect. Hallucinations that are religious in nature which change lives are well-known but Christians usually say that in a lot of cases they are just the work of demons and not hallucinations in the psychiatric sense. So we are to assume miracles then when instead we can assume a hallucination that may be inexplicable but which may not necessarily be supernatural.

It is unfair to of critics to argue that the visions of Jesus were not hallucinations of any kind because hallucinations do not turn the visionaries into missionaries. They wouldn’t when it is ordinary people they see. The Jesus case could very unique if the gospels are accurate and thus outside the scope of that criticism. But it could be argued that those who see visions of the dead or ghosts do become missionaries in the sense that they can suffer derision and inconvenience for telling their story. It could be that the appearances of Jesus had no life-changing effect but then afterwards when the apostles thought about them and got revelation from God and searched the Old Testament for guidance that they got their effect. This however would mean the interpretation not the experience had the effect. It is dishonest how we are led to think that Jesus was not a hallucination because he changed lives by appearing when the consequences could have been what was doing the changing. Interpretations make most missionaries.

There is no need for veridical hallucinations to be necessarily psychic. People only report them and consider them to be psychic when they happen at the time the person dies or something. Otherwise they just think they are imagination and ignore them.

The visions of Jesus might have been veridical hallucinations and that should be accepted before a resurrection appearance for it is simpler and more rational.

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HYPNOPOMPIC HALLUCINATIONS

The phenomenon of hypnopompic hallucinations is conveniently left out of Christian apologetics. This is a form of hallucination that sometimes happens before sleeping people are ready to waken up. They can see ghosts or even aliens (page 96, Why People Believe Weird Things). There are no rules though since it is a hallucination and not a dream it is necessary for the person to think they have woken up already.

The gospels tell us that the apostles slept the night Jesus was arrested and he could not get them to stay awake so stress did not affect their fondness for sleeping. We read that Peter, James and John had fallen asleep and then thought they saw Jesus’ face change its features and Moses and Elijah appear (Luke 9:32). Hypnopompic hallucination suffices as an explanation for this. When the three main men were prone to such hallucination what does that say about the other apostles and the women?

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HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS

This book argues against the hallucination possibility in chapter eight. Not a single quotation from reputable psychiatric experts appears in the text. The authors make their view of what hallucinations can and cannot do in such a way that they can make it look like hallucinations are not an explanation for the resurrection visions. They use a straw-man approach in relation to answering the suggestion that the appearances were hallucinations. They deliberately ignore the fact that many psychiatrists hold that hallucinations that cannot be explained by normal or earthly forces and disorders happen. Psychiatrists only claim to deal with hallucinations identified as such by the laws of this world. If somebody reports alien abduction visions and lying and mental illness and fantasy and abnormality have been excluded the psychiatrist will naturally assume that it is a hallucination but outside the scope of medical science in its current state.

The book claims that mere visions of Jesus would prove nothing. What we need, it continues, is for Jesus to appear to be physically alive after his death. It says that it couldn’t have been a hallucination for the body was missing from the tomb – see pages 187-188. Page 180 says that resurrection is distinct from a vision for a vision can be caused by your own mind or by some supernatural power such as a demon and it remains “purely spiritual and subjective: it is in your psyche”. To eliminate the idea that the resurrection was a vision, it says that Jesus’ risen body was seen by several people in public at the one time and he was touched and he was able to eat.

What this amounts to is, the mystery of the empty tomb proves the resurrection and the resurrection proves the empty tomb for visions alone aren’t good enough. If visions alone aren’t enough how can we depend on visions if they say that say the explanation for the empty tomb is that Jesus was raised?

It says that there were too many witnesses to hallucinate. It says that 500+ saw Jesus and just takes Paul’s word for that. It even has the nerve to lie that Paul invited his readers to go and interview these people (page 187). The even more laughable part is that it says the witnesses were reliable though we know next to nothing about them! The gospels even say that the apostles had trouble believing in Jesus though they knew him best meaning that they were not reliable though they do not mean for us to see it like that. But it will be replied that they changed their minds.

The book then tells the lie that Mary appeared to 70,000 at Fatima knowing full well that she did not for they only saw the miracle of the sun and not all of them did. It says that this matches the vision of the 500 and says that this however was a vision and not a physical resurrection. But the appearances of Jesus were not a resurrection either but only visions of a resurrected man like the three children of Fatima supposedly saw Mary as a resurrected woman. I don’t know why I bother attacking this shocking tissue of deviousness. The book says that five hundred separate visions of Elvis may be dismissed. But even the New Testament gives no real indication that all who saw Jesus saw the same thing at exactly the same time. Then the handbook claims that unlike hallucinations Jesus hung around for forty days. But he may have only been seen for a few moments at a time over that period.

Then it is dishonestly argued that the hallucination would not have been believed in if Jesus had been still in the tomb! But what about the early Christian doctrine that the resurrection body is made from the seed of the dead body? The dead body contributes something to the formation of this body – that is all. If a body was cremated and a tiny pinch of dust was used to form the resurrection body that would satisfy the situation for it to be a resurrection from the dead.

CONCLUSION

There is nothing wrong with the idea that Jesus’ appearing after his death was a hallucination by the witnesses. Christians use distortion to avoid this conclusion.

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Saturday, 16 February 2008

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