The Resurrection, Hallucinations, and Worldviews
Thesis
This paper will argue that the hallucinations hypothesis for the followers of the resurrected Jesus is psychologically implausible and is generated by a self-destructive worldview.
Introduction
From the beginning of time, God has worked phenomena that are different than how He typically sustains the world. These extraordinary phenomena are called miracles. Throughout the testimony of Scripture, mention is made of God’s miraculous works. A chief miracle in Scripture is when God the Father raised His Son, Jesus, from the dead on the third day. This chief miracle, like many other miracles, is not believed by many people. Since the fall of man in the garden, man has sought ways to avert himself from facing the truth of God, who He is, and what He does. One of the ways men do this is by denying the miraculous claims of Scripture and positing alternative explanations that usually accord with the worldview of naturalism. This paper will deal with one specific alternative theory provided by non-Christians to explain away the supernatural claim of the Bible, namely that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead and seen by His disciples. The theory is called the hallucination hypothesis, which argues that Paul and other early disciples of Jesus did not really see Jesus in reality after He was dead, but rather had a false subjective experience, namely, a hallucination.
The Hallucination Hypothesis Explicated
Following the tail of the Enlightenment, non-Christians began to theorize away the direct claims of miracles in Scripture; the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus was a target for many. Arguing that the testimonies of the early disciples seeing Jesus after He died were handled by claiming that a psychological phenomenon was really what took place. Gary Habermas explains the setting of this hypothesis in this way: “The hallucination theory was chiefly popular in the nineteenth century. Various versions of the theory experienced a slight resurgence in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century. These attempts agree in suggesting that early believers’ subjective experiences account for their belief that Jesus had risen.”[1] By subjective experiences, the point is that these experiences did not correspond to a real object, namely, the risen Christ. They were rather hallucinations of some sort.
Popular proponents of this view include New Testament professor Gerd Ludemann, who argues this view in a debate with William Lane Craig.[2] Liberal biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman, who takes an agnostic position on the issue of the appearances of Jesus in his book How Jesus Became God, has since articulated that he believes Paul’s claim of seeing Jesus was, in fact, a hallucination.[3] Jack Kent also appeals to an individual hallucination theory with Paul and others, but avoids the view when applied to groups.[4] These argue that, in light of the historical data that indeed presents a strange event of some kind; a naturalistic explanation is to be preferred over the Biblical claim of a miracle. “Dead men don’t come back to life,” they insist.
The Hallucination Hypothesis Rebutted
The question that should be addressed now is what evidence is there for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. This will be handled threefold: the biblical claims to the resurrected Christ, the appearances of the risen Christ, and then the psychological data and its application to the hallucination hypothesis.
Biblical Testimony to Christ’s Death and Resurrection
The death of Jesus the Messiah is predicted in the Old Testament centuries before His incarnation in Psalm 22:16, where He is crucified. Verses 21-31 of this Psalm intimate his subsequent resurrection in the consequences it describes, namely, Him causing the ends of the earth to turn to the Lord. Later in the prophets, Isaiah speaks of the messiah’s death in various ways, from being “smitten by God”, “pierced for our transgressions”, and his grave being made with the rich in “His death” (Isa. 53:4-10 ESV). Verse 10 of Isaiah 53 speaks of His resurrection when it mentions Him seeing His offspring and prolonging His days.
In the New Testament, the four Gospels record Jesus’ death. Mark’s account is found in chapter 14 and specifically mentions in verse 37 that Jesus breathed His last breath. In chapter 16, verses 1-8, the resurrection is narrated when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Salome found the empty tomb. In Matthew’s account, Jesus cries out on the cross and breathes His last breath (Matt. 27:50). In chapter 28, verses 1-7, Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus, go to the tomb and find that the angel of the Lord has rolled back the stone. In Luke’s account, Jesus also cries out and breathes His last on the cross (Lk. 23:46). In Luke 24, verses 1-3, it is recorded that the women took spices to the tomb early on the first day of the week, only to find the tomb empty of the body of Jesus. In John’s account, Jesus, hanging on the cross, says, “It is finished,” and then bows His head and “gives up His spirit” (John 19:30). The resurrection is recorded in chapter 20, verses 1-10, with Mary Magdalene finding the empty tomb and then showing Peter. It should be noted that though these are historical claims from books written by people with religious and philosophical biases, that does not automatically negate the data they present, for every historical work is written by persons with religious and philosophical biases. It must also be noted that these testimonies were written early in proximity to the events they report, and they are numerous and are presented as independent works. These features are weighty when doing a historical assessment of the data.
Biblical Evidence of Jesus’ Post-Mortem Appearances
Not only are there multiple early and independent testimonies of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but there are also testimonies of His appearances after He died. In Mark’s account, he writes that Jesus appeared to the eleven disciples when they were sitting at the table and He rebuked their unbelief (Mk. 16:14). In Matthew’s account, he narrates that when the disciples went away to Galilee, they saw Jesus and worshipped Him, though some of them doubted (Matt. 28:16-17). In Luke’s gospel, a group of disciples went to Jerusalem, and there, as they were discussing how Jesus had appeared to Simon, Jesus then stood in their midst and said, “Peace to you” (Lk. 24:33-37). John’s account shows that when the disciples were in a room with the doors locked, hiding from the Jews, Jesus appeared in their midst and spoke peace to them (Jn. 20:19-20). The testimony that most historians see as carrying the most weight is Paul’s in 1 Corinthians15:3-8, where Paul claims that Jesus appeared after His death to Cephas, the group of twelve disciples, then more than five hundred others at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and then Paul says Jesus appeared to him personally. This passage stands as the weightiest for so many historians because it records an eyewitness testimony of Jesus’ post-mortem appearance. Typically, historiographers of a naturalistic persuasion will give some weight to the writings of the four gospels and Paul about other people seeing the risen Christ, but they point out the fallibility of second and potentially third-hand reporting in them. Of course, it must be noted how many other historical events naturalists believe on the basis of a much later single testimony of an event. The supernatural nature of the claims, they say, keeps them at bay. If the hallucination hypothesis holders can admit anything, it at least must be that we have a lot of historical testimony of people seeing the resurrected Christ.
The Hypothesis’s Problems with the Psychological Data
A group of psychiatrists, Harold Kaplan, Benjamin Sadock, and Jack Grebb, reported the profiles of persons who tend to have hallucinations: women, adolescents, young adults, less-educated persons, people with low I.Q.s or low socioeconomic status, and combat personnel.[5] Dr. Habermas points out that none of these characteristics would have applied to Paul and that it would be hard to prove them of either James or Peter.[6] Some posit that Paul would have been induced to a hallucination due to grief, having stood by at the killing of Stephen, and having heard of the Jesus preached by him, now, Paul, feeling guilt subjectively thinks he sees Jesus. The problem with this theory is that there is no evidence that Paul felt guilty about any of his past actions. All we know is that up to the point of his Damascus Road encounter, he was set on opposing the Christian movement (Acts 9:1-6).
Another problem with the hallucination theory, as noted by Clinical Psychologist Gary Collins in an email correspondence with Gary Habermas, is that hallucinations are individual occurrences, not something experienced by more than one person at a time.[7] If hallucinations don’t occur to more than one person at a time, they surely don’t occur to groups, one such group of five hundred people, as Paul noted in 1 Corinthians 15:6.
From another angle, the profiles of both James (the half-brother of Jesus) and Paul cause another difficulty for the hallucination hypothesis. James was a skeptic of his half-brother Jesus’ message as seen in the Gospel narratives in Mark 3:21 and John 7:3-5, where he thought his brother to be out of his mind. However, later we read of James being converted to Christianity and serving as a leader in the Jerusalem church (Acts 15). We have no evidence that James began feeling internally conflicted about his view of Jesus or had any of the preconditions for a hallucination. Anything shy of a real encounter with the risen Christ is a stretch to serve as the etiology of this transformation in James.
Paul, as noted briefly above, was an avid persecutor of the Church (Acts 8:3) and approved of the execution of Stephen, the Christian (Acts 8:1). The psychiatrists mentioned above, Kaplan, Sadock, and Grebb, also state in their findings an incongruence with the Biblical data, namely that the hallucination by Paul was both auditory and visual, something even rarer in the psychiatric literature.[8] It is simply the fact that there is no known evidence that Paul possessed any of the preconditions for a grief hallucination of the risen Christ, being the Church persecutor that he was. To attempt a slightly different way out, some may object that the Greek term Paul used ophthe “he appeared” is ambiguous and does not require an encounter with a bodily Jesus (fitting more with a hallucination theory). However, N.T. Wright noted that the description Paul uses in the rest of the same chapter in Corinthians has in view a bodily resurrection of believers, this being in connection to the form and nature in which Paul encountered Jesus when he appeared to him.[9] The above data and scientific reports on the state and findings of psychology demonstrate the implausibility of explaining the appearances of the risen Jesus as hallucinations.
Where the Issue Really Lies
As the thesis states in this paper, the hallucination hypothesis is generated from a self-destructive worldview. It must be addressed in a paper dealing with the specific evidence and objections to the resurrection of Jesus, what it is that determines the interpretational route a historian takes. There is a sense in which all historians are working with the same data. Michael Licona speaks of what is called the minimal facts approach to dealing with the resurrection of Jesus. He says of this, “This approach considers only those data that are so strongly attested historically that they are granted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject, even the rather skeptical ones.”[10] The first fact is that Jesus died by crucifixion; the second fact is that Jesus’ disciples believed that He rose and appeared to them. The third fact is that the Church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed. The last fact is that the skeptical half-brother of Jesus, James, was suddenly changed. It would seem that if nearly all historians have this same data to work with, they would come to the same conclusions. But this is far from the truth, showing that the issue must lie somewhere else.
The truth is that every historian is a person made in the image of God but fallen due to sin. Romans 1 says that unredeemed man is at constant work trying to suppress the truth about God within himself. This suppression leads to idolatry, namely, an anti-Christian worldview. Paul speaks of the unredeemed man as having a mind that is darkened (Eph. 4:18). This darkened understanding corrupts and controls the way fallen man interprets everything he encounters, including historical investigation and conclusions. When it comes to the issue of miracles and historical investigation, Vern Poythress notes in his book Redeeming Our Thinking about History: A God-Centered Approach that since the Enlightenment, naturalistic thinkers have generally failed to acknowledge their presuppositional commitment to a non-miraculous worldview, realizing that miracles are ruled out a priori.[11] In other words, there is no view of history from nowhere. Every historian interprets data through a philosophical bias.
The Influence of David Hume
David Hume argues in his famous essay “Of Miracles” that a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature and that these laws, being unalterable, are proof against such claims.[12] In other words, as stated earlier by the skeptics of the resurrection of Jesus, “Paul must have hallucinated because dead men don’t rise.” This perspective is not without critique. It assumes a finite man can access what the universe is always like. It assumes that man, as a being in a naturalistic world, has reliable access to the external world of facts. It also assumes, as John Frame critiques, that all men have always experienced these laws without exception.[13]
To deal with the first assumption of Hume’s statement. To call something a law would require that a thing is always the case. When applied to miracle claims, how can the Humean know whether or not all men have remained dead after death? To come close to being qualified for this assertion, one would have to have experience with all dead people in all of the world throughout all time. This is not knowledge one has access to on Hume’s position. Philosopher Richard Swinburne has argued that the concept of a law is becoming more accurately viewed as a statistical generality rather than something absolute.[14] This view of law fits with the Christian view of miracles since Christian theology teaches that miracles are rare and extraordinary acts of God.
Statistically speaking, a Christian would affirm that Jesus’ resurrection was a statistically unlikely event, but it was possible.
Next, Hume’s view assumes man is the kind of being and in the kind of world where knowledge of the external world is accessible for him to learn about. This does not follow from Hume’s naturalistic worldview. If man’s sense and reasoning faculties are the sum of time, chance, and matter, there is no reason to believe those faculties are a reliable guide to any fact; this includes facts about history and whether miracles are possible or not. To put it another way, if the reason one believes that a miracle like the resurrection of Jesus could not happen is that this is a naturalistic world, then one could not come to know that very statement to be the case. This becomes self-refuting.
Lastly, Hume’s view assumes that the experiences of everyone throughout time have excluded miracles. This assumption is not fair to the claims of people’s own testimonies. Hume must factor in the testimonies of all people, not only naturalists like himself. When one factors in the claims of the Biblical writers like Moses, an educated man, Luke, a doctor, Paul, a first-century scholar, and Christians throughout the Church age, one can’t fairly hold to this assumption. Take even the experiences of the modern era, documented by Craig Keener in his book Miracles Today, where he highlights with citations and medical research the miracles of various sorts by people of all calibers of profession and intelligence from all around the world.[15] The experiences of these people must not be left out of Hume’s equation.
Conclusion
It has been shown that antagonists to the Christian faith have presented various alternative theories to avoid accepting the biblical claim of miracles and, in particular, the resurrection of Jesus (the hallucination hypothesis, being the focus of this paper). Ample evidence lies before the historian from a first-person eyewitness to reliable reports of groups of people, including skeptics and former persecutors, to encountering the bodily risen Jesus after His death by crucifixion. The hallucination hypothesis struggles to stand in light of the psychological literature and its failure to comport with the profiles of the early witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus and to serve as an adequate etiology for their sudden change. Lastly, it has been shown that virtually all historians deal with the same data. Data that is admitted by both sides requires a strange and statistically unlikely explanation. However, all historians are influenced and limited by their philosophical biases about the world, which defines the boundaries of possibility, and the relationship God has in our situation. This paper has shown that the world view propounded by David Hume (naturalism) is what generates these anti-miracle hypotheses to historical claims, and when followed consistently, leads to arbitrariness concerning its own assumptions and destroys the possibility of historical inquiry itself. The reader is encouraged to affirm the miraculous nature of the resurrection of Jesus and to interpret history from a worldview that makes interpreting history possible and gloriously robust!
Author: Troy Goldsmith, founder of Aletheia Ministries. (B.S. University of the Cumberlands, and current graduate student at Liberty Theological Seminary)
References
[1] Gary R. Habermas, The Risen Jesus & Future Hope (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 10.
[2] Gerd Ludemann, “First Rebuttal”, Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? A Debate Between William Lane Craig
and Gerd Lüdemann, Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli, eds. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 53.
[3] Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 187.
[4] Gary, Habermas. “Explaining A Explaining Away Jesus' Resurrection: The Recent Revival of Hallucination Theories”, LBTS Faculty Publications and Presentations. 2001.
[5] Harold Kaplan, Benjamin Sadock, and Jack Grebb, Synopsis of Psychiatry, 7th ed. (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1994), 621.
[6] Gary, Habermas. “Explaining A Explaining Away Jesus' Resurrection: The Recent Revival of Hallucination Theories”, LBTS Faculty Publications and Presentations. 2001.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Harold Kaplan, Benjamin Sadock, and Jack Grebb, Synopsis of Psychiatry, 7th ed. (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1994), 621-22.
[9] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 383.
[10] Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel Publications, 2004), 44.
[11] Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Our Thinking about History: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 79.
[12] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles W. Hendel (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 117-141.
[13] John M. Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief, ed. Joseph E. Torres, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), 146.
[14] Richard Swinburne, The Concept of Miracle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 2–3.
[15] Craig S. Keener, Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Academic, 2021).
