According to O’Collins and the opposing scholarship he examines, Jesus’s death and resurrection face a number of important challenges. Three of these challenges, all involving Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection, give some plausible food for thought. However, O’Collins shows logical flaws in the arguments.
The first argument, originally pioneered by the pagan philosopher, Celsus, claims that those who witnessed Christ’s resurrection were suffering from hallucinations; or they had concocted one of the biggest, yet most influential, lies in ancient history. From the hallucination perspective, the idea here is that, because death can be an overwhelmingly traumatic event, and because Jesus’ followers were filled with anxiety about what they understood to be his resurrection, they were stuck in a psychological state of imagining Jesus’ appearances. (O’Collins 93).
O’Collins points out two problems with this argument: 1.) The appearances occurred to different groups and individuals, all over an extended period of time. A group hallucination would be more credible if the appearance had happened to the entire group, all at once. 2.) As Paul encountered the risen Christ well after Jesus’ resurrection (1 Cor. 15:8), and that he spent his pre-Christian life as a fierce anti-Christian, the reductive claims that he blatantly had a hallucinogenic experience does not square up (94).
Another argument suggests similarities between the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection and those who have had near-death experiences (NDEs). However, this argument is near self-refuting, right from the get-go: NDEs most often occur as part of a serious illness or injury. The New Testament does not record Jesus’ followers as suffering from illness, nor are NDEs something that happen to a group of people, anyway. NDEs are based on individual experiences — including the mere fact that the individuals are considered clinically dead — and can subjectively vary from person to person. These reasons alone make it mind boggling why scholars such as Carnley would then leap to Paul’s encounter with a light (Jesus) as having an NDE-like quality. O’Collins quells this argument by explaining that the light Paul experiences in Acts (9:3, 17; 22:6) is not the same as the illuminating light in NDEs (O’Collins 96).
Lastly, scholars such Hick, Allision, and Carnley make a similar claim to the hallucinations argument; except, in this case, the claim is that the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection perhaps had various forms of encounters with the deceased Jesus. For example, consider a widow who may report specific encounters with her deceased husband. These encounters may include the sensation of the widow seeing, hearing, touching, or speaking with her husband. One valid point here is that the Jesus’ followers, stricken with grief and guilt, could have also experienced the deceased Jesus’ “presence”, just as the widow may also be in the same psychological state from her own grief and possible guilt (O’Collins 97, 98).
O’Collins reports a few studies that support the experiences reported by widows and widowers. Still, these studies have flaws as well. For instance, as they all involve what individuals have reported, there are no cases of multiple people simultaneously having the same experiences with the same deceased loved one. Also, while widows/widowers have reported encounters for many years after their loved ones died, the witnesses to Christ’s resurrection saw him only once, or perhaps a few times at most, prior to his ascension into heaven (O’Collins 98, 99).
And there’s the empty tomb. But that’s for another post!
Works Cited
O’Collins, Gerald. Christology: A Biblical, Historical and Systematic Study of Jesus. 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.