I’ve written about this before, but want to pull together some strands that demonstrate the risen Jesus was a vision or hallucination. He appeared only in the mind of others: the New Testament tells us as much.
Exhibit 1. Paul writes of the appearance of the risen Jesus, whom he sees as a ‘life-giving Spirit’, being ‘in’ him (Galatians 1.16). Paul has more than one such vision, including his trip to heaven recounted in 2 Corinthians 12.2, which he refers to as his ‘revelations’.
Exhibit 2. Paul implies in Corinthians 15.5-8 that others who have experienced the post-mortem Jesus ‘saw’ him in exactly the same way he did. For Paul, there was no difference between his inner-visions and those experienced by the so-called apostles.
Exhibit 3. The author of Acts creates a story out of Paul’s first vision, the famous account of his conversion on the road to Damascus. It’s a fabrication of course, told differently each time it’s referred to Even so, Luke retains the visionary nature of the experience: Jesus is a bright light and a disembodied voice.
Exhibit 4. The other sightings of the risen Jesus in Acts are visions. When, for example, Stephen is about to be stoned (Acts 7:54-56) he sees in his mind’s eye the heavens open and Jesus sitting at the right hand of god. Other New Testament encounters of the resurrected Jesus, such as John’s Revelation, are explicitly said to be visions.
Exhibit 5. Many of the sightings of the risen Jesus in Matthew and Luke are not of a real, physical human being. Those who experience him see him materialising in locked rooms, vanishing at will and floating up into the clouds. None of these events actually happened; they are the gospel writers’ literary realisations of visions experienced decades earlier, and they retain the hallucinatory qualities of those experiences.
Exhibit 6. Remaining with the gospels’ accounts of the risen Jesus, there is the strange phenomenon of those experiencing him failing to recognise him. Mary in the garden thinks he’s the gardener; the disciples on the road to Emmaus don’t know its him until he breaks bread; the disciples mistake him for someone else on the shore until he tells them how to fish properly. Most damning of all, some of the inner circle of disciples doubt it’s Jesus they’re seeing in their collective visions (Matt 28:17-18). Again, these stories preserve the tradition that the earlier visions weren’t always recognised as Jesus. And why wasn’t he? Because he was an hallucination
Exhibit 7. The risen Jesus has to prove who he is. According to Acts 1:1-3, he ‘presents himself’ his followers, some of whom have wandered around aimlessly with him for three years, and has to convince them he is who he appears to be. And, the text suggests, it takes him forty days to do it. This makes no sense. A far better explanation of this story (and it is a story) is that having experienced their visions of something-they-took-to-be-the-resurrected-Jesus (bright lights? Disembodied voices?), his followers set about convincing themselves that what they experienced really was their former Master. This they did by scouring the scriptures to find ‘proof’ that the Messiah would die and rise again. We know this is how their thinking worked. The same process was used to create the gospels and is evident throughout the New Testament.
Exhibit 8. Dead people stay dead. They do not resurrect.. This is not an a priori assumption. No corpse has ever revived after 36 hours or indeed any other period of time. We know this experientially, statistically and scientifically. Only in stories and religious myth do the dead return. This is what we are dealing with here: stories and myth that flesh out the visions and hallucinations of a few religious zealots.
rejectingjesus, 
Definitely lots and lots of holes … but believers plug them with “faith.” 🙏
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Again, I must begin with an apology to Neil for a long comment. But I believe it to be illustrative.
I’ve mentioned before that a marriage in my family in the early 1980s brought me an extended family of Mormons. A study of Mormonism and experience with Mormons would play a big part in giving me the tools I would use decades later to deconstruct my own Christianity.
One of the many miracles of early Mormonism provides an interesting look at how a large group of people can all witness a miracle that never happened. The story shows how within just a few decades, dozens or even hundreds of people can come to believe (or at least claim) to have witnessed something that never happened.
The death of Joseph Smith in 1844 left the Mormon church with a succession crisis. Several leaders claimed to have been chosen by Smith as his successor. The two with the largest followings were Brigham Young and Sidney Rigdon. Rather than repeat the story myself, I’ll copy from an article by MormonThink.com:
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Transfiguration of Brigham Young
LDS Urban Legend: This is how the story goes…after the death of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, the Church was left leaderless. All the members wanted to know who the new leader would be, so a meeting was called. Sidney Rigdon got up first and campaigned for himself to be the next leader. Then it was Brigham Young’s turn, and as he spoke, the members witnessed a miracle. It looked to them as if Brigham Young transformed into Joseph Smith before their very eyes. Young looked like Joseph, he sounded like Joseph, and his mannerisms were like Joseph. Clearly this was a miracle to show the members who the next prophet should be.
The only problem is that no one talked about this amazing transformation when it happened. There are no journals, letters, or newspaper accounts written at the time of the meeting that would back up this amazing story. It is true that such a meeting took place. And it is true that both Sidney Rigdon and Brigham Young spoke at the meeting. But no account of the transformation was recorded at that time.
Historian Richard Van Wagoner has searched all diaries, journals, newspapers, and church records written shortly after the meeting and has found no evidence to verify the “miracle transformation” story. You can read more about his findings by reading his published report.
Brigham’s speech was reported on in detail in both Nauvoo newspapers and recorded by scribes for the official church records. Hundreds of members present wrote about Brigham’s persuasive argument in great detail in their private journals. Nowhere was there a mention of the miraculous or divine.
So where does the story come from? There is no recorded account of the transformation until many years later, after the Saints were settled in Utah. In 1857, 13 years after the speech, Albert Carrington is the first to mention the transformation. In a speech before a huge gathering of Saints, he said that he couldn’t tell Brigham from Joseph that day when Brigham was speaking. Soon others were making the same claim.
Records even show that it was impossible for several members who made the claim to have witnessed the miracle to have even been in Nauvoo at the time of the meeting.
But not all members got caught up in the new story. Bishop George Miller, present at the gathering, later recalled that nothing supernatural had occurred on that day. Young made a “long and loud harangue,” Miller later wrote, for which I “could not see any point in the course of his remarks than to overturn Sidney Rigdon’s pretensions.”
Richard Van Wagoner wrote probably the best essay on this topic published in Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought, Volume 28, No. 4, Winter 1995.
Van Wagoner details the evolving story showing how the myth of Brigham Young transforming into Joseph Smith was created. Van Wagoner uses the original diaries of the people in attendance at the meeting on August 8, 1844 providing evidence that those there neglected to note the miracle that occurred before their eyes, but later in life the Utah Mormons (including many that weren’t even in attendance) describe the transfiguration they supposedly witnessed first hand in great detail. This is a wonderful illustration of how many of the religious myths were/are started.
[ http://www.mormonthink.com/glossary/transfiguration.htm ]
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The study by Richard S. Van Wagoner, The Making of a Mormon Myth: The 1844 Transfiguration of Brigham Young, was published in Dialogue, Vol. 28, No. 4, Winter 1995 and can be found here: http://www.mormonismi.net/pdf/myth_creation.pdf
A faithful telling of the story, with many quotes from “witnesses,” can be found on BYU Studies: https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-mantle-of-the-prophet-joseph-passes-to-brother-brigham-a-collective-spiritual-witness/
Every single one of the testimonies presented was written after Albert Carrington first presented the story 13 years after the fact and contradicts reports made at the time.
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No need to apologise, Kos. It’s not nearly as long as some I’ve received from other quarters.
It’s a very interesting phenomenon isn’t it, this recreating the past in memory so that it serves some political or ‘spiritual’ purpose. I wasn’t aware of the miraculous Brigham Young transfiguration story. The parallel is of course the supposed sighting of the resurrected Jesus in the first century cult.
Perhaps back then one person had a vision of what he took to be a risen Messiah. Subsequently, his experience was embroidered – either inadvertently, deliberately, dishonestly or by individuals jumping on the bandwagon – until others began claiming this was their experience too. These new stories were in turn added to until finally some literate guy decided to write them up as ‘real’ events.
While this seems most likely to me, we’ll never know for sure, because unlike the Mormon experience, no-one recorded the original resurrection experience as it occurred enabling us to compare what actually happened with the later, embroidered versions. This is a major flaw in Christianity; there simply aren’t any contemporaneous records of Jesus and what happened to him. Like you, I’m inclined to think that this is because he didn’t exist except in one or two fanciful inner-visions.
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I’ve been thinking about this whole “revelation” thing, especially revelations from a dream. I don’t remember my dreams much anymore, but the other day, I found myself remembering some bits of a weird dream I had had the night before.
Of course, there was some “reality”, but a lot of crazy stuff too.
How anyone could think that something as disjointed as a dream could be true, or a message from someone is beyond me.
You would have to doctor your interpretation to cull all the random craziness from the parts you want to “interpret”…after this, you’ve crafted a “message” from a being.
It’s literally you inventing a message, then saying “it’s from god!”
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I agree with goyo 100%.
Also, what if ancient mystics, either consciously or subconsciously, stumbled on a form of lucid dreaming — where, again either consciously or subconsciously, they could guide their dreams to be about Jesus, or end times, or God’s judgement, or whatever their particular sect was concerned with?
Just a thought.
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Just another thought.
“ Prior work by neurologists, including Kevin Nelson of the University of Kentucky, suggests that NDEs are indeed generated by the same brain mechanisms that cause lucid dreams. Nelson’s research shows that both types of experiences arise when part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal region — our “logical center,” which is usually active only when we’re awake — becomes active during REM sleep, allowing extremely vivid dreams that seem to be happening in real life. He calls the transitional state between dreaming and wakefulness a “borderland of consciousness” and believes it is in this mixed state that lucid dreams and NDEs occur. ”
Near-Death Experiences are Lucid Dreams, Experiment Finds
https://www.livescience.com/19106-death-experiences-lucid-dreams.html
bolding added
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Makes sense to me! But then I’m not indoctrinated to “other” perspectives. 😛
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