Did the Apostle's Invent the Resurrection? Part 2:

In the first part of our investigation into this question, we established that there was no Jewish expectation of a dying-rising messianic figure during Jesus’s time, and that his Jerusalem disciples were unlikely to have been influenced by pagan practices such as apotheosis (elevating a human being to the divine realm). We now consider two other related questions:

1. Does a false resurrection claim seem likely?

2. Could the disciples have experienced hallucinations of a risen Jesus?

Does a false resurrection claim seem likely?

It is important that we do not underestimate the severe consequences of the disciples’ claim that Jesus had risen from the dead. The gospel records make it clear that Jesus’s teachings had aroused bitter animosity among some Jewish leaders. They had conspired to have him put to death, and his followers were apparently threatened with exclusion from the synagogue (John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2), which would have had serious cultural and economic implications for Jews of the time.

The insistent teaching that Jesus had risen as the promised messiah and the unique Son of God led to violent conflicts between Christians and Jews: around 35 AD, Stephen was stoned to death by antagonistic Jews (Acts 7:59), and around 44 AD, the Jewish tetrarch Herod Agrippa had John’s brother James killed (Acts 12:2). After initially persecuting Jesus’s followers, the converted Apostle Paul wrote about the dangers of preaching a risen Christ: “Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one . . . I have been in danger . . . from my fellow Jews” (2 Cor 11:24–26).

Jesus’s brother James became a prominent leader in the Jerusalem Church, and the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus recorded his death at the hands of Jewish leaders. In AD 62, the Roman governor Porcius Festus had died and his replacement had not yet arrived in Jerusalem. Josephus wrote:

“Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so [Ananus] assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus—the one called Christ—whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned” (Antiquities 20.9.1 §200).

As Philip Alexander explains:

“It is abundantly clear from the New Testament itself that Christianity before 70 not only attracted support but also encountered strong and widespread opposition within the Jewish community. That opposition ranged from central authorities in Jerusalem (the High Priest and the Sanhedrin) to the leaders of the local synagogues. It extended from Palestine (both Galilee and Jerusalem) to the Diaspora (e.g. Asia Minor and Achaea). It began in the time of Jesus himself and continued unabated in the period after the crucifixion” (“Parting of the Ways,” 19).

It is very difficult to find a plausible explanation for why Jesus’s followers in Palestine would have conspired to concoct a bizarre story that created so much turmoil in their lives, and why, within mere decades of Jesus’s death, some of his family and immediate disciples were prepared to suffer and even die in support of a false resurrection claim. If any of these people were aware that the resurrection story was a hoax, it is inconceivable that no one would have spilt the beans in order to avoid the intensifying persecution from Roman authorities and fellow Jews.

And if the resurrection story was a deliberate fabrication aimed at exalting and deifying the human Jesus, we would expect the reports to be far more creative and flamboyant. However, the New Testament does not even attempt to describe Jesus’s actual rising. By contrast, the later noncanonical Gospel of Peter is more dramatic: it describes Jesus exiting the tomb with his head reaching beyond the clouds, accompanied by a cross that answers a voice from heaven.

The claim of a deliberate conspiracy also does not explain why Jesus’s disciples experienced a dramatic transformation from terror to defiant courage. Overall, the claim lacks evidence and a plausible motive, so it does not seem very likely.

Could the disciples have experienced hallucinations of a risen Jesus?

If a deliberate hoax seems unlikely, the other possibility is that the disciples’ belief in Jesus’s rising was a sincere error. Perhaps his distraught, grieving followers had so longed to see him again that they experienced a shared hallucination of his return. But this proposal has severe problems:

• The disciples do not seem to have been in a heightened state of excited anticipation. Instead of gathering near Jesus’s tomb, they apparently hid behind locked doors in fear for their lives (John 20:19). And when Mary and her companions reported the absence of Jesus’s body in the tomb, the disciples “did not believe the women because their words seemed to them like nonsense” (Luke 24:11).

• If Jesus’s disciples did experience a collective hallucination of him, they would probably have interpreted it as being a visitation by his spirit. Why would they have taught that Jesus had risen bodily from death, leaving an empty tomb? This was not consistent with Hellenic or Judaic beliefs of the time.

• At a time when the people involved were still alive to challenge his statement, the Apostle Paul wrote that Jesus had appeared to them at different times—first to Peter, then the twelve apostles, then a larger group of disciples, and then James (1 Cor 15:5–8). But there is no case study to suggest that different people can possibly experience a consistent hallucination at different places and times.

• What explains Paul’s vision a few years later? Unlike Jesus’s loving followers, Paul was a ferocious opponent of Jesus’s teaching: he was not suffering from grief and certainly had no desire to see a risen Jesus. Gerd Lüdemann has claimed that Paul’s vision must have sprung from suppressed doubt and guilt about his persecution of Jesus’s followers, and he suggests that “analysis would probably have shown a strong inclination to Christ in his subconscious; indeed, the assumption that he was unconsciously Christian is then no longer so far–fetched” (“Resurrection,” 26). However, there is absolutely no evidence, least of all in Paul’s own letters, that this self-righteous Pharisee suffered any doubt or guilt before his Damascus experience. And although psychological stress can be converted into physical symptoms, which might help to explain Paul’s temporary blindness, such conversion disorders are not associated with hallucinations, and it is highly improbable that Paul would have experienced two profound but different psychological disorders at the same time.

There is therefore no evidence in Scripture or psychiatry to support the hallucination hypothesis. In the opinion of medical doctor Joseph Bergeron:

“Psychiatric hypotheses for the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection are found to be inconsistent with current medical understanding and do not offer plausible explanations for the biblical story of Easter” (“Resurrection: A Clinical Review,” 157).

And Jewish theologian Pinchas Lapide made this important observation:

“When these peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, who betrayed and denied their master and failed him so miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confident mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.”

This dramatic alteration in the disciples led Lapide to a startling conclusion: “I accept the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event” (Resurrection, 125, 131).

Conclusion:

Overall, there is no reason to believe that Jesus’s followers in Palestine were the source of a false resurrection story. If they adamantly believed that their executed leader had risen from his tomb, the simplest explanation would be that they did indeed encounter him in some form after his death, which leads to the third question in this series: What happened to Jesus’s body?