![]() No two hallucinations are identical from person to person. It must not be overlooked that hallucinations are private experiences occurring only in the milieu of the individual’s brain. Could a group of people with uncontrolled psychiatric illness have deployed such a rapid and successful expansion of Christianity in the first century? This hardly seems plausible. In Jesus’s time people with psychiatric illness were ostracized and considered incompetent or demonized. īut could Jesus’s disciples have all simultaneously suffered severe medical or psychiatric illness? This contention defies reason and probability. Hallucinations generally arise from three disease categories: (1) psychophysiological causes related to an alteration of function or structure in the brain (a brain tumor, for example) (2) psychobiochemical causes due to alteration of chemical neurotransmitters within the brain (for example, delirium tremens in alcohol withdrawal) or (3) psychodynamic causes, namely the intrusion of psychiatric illness into the conscious mind. Most proponents of the hallucination hypothesis overlook the fact that hallucinations are symptoms of an underlying illness. As the majority of proponents of the hallucination hypothesis are outside the disciplines of medical education and healthcare practice, an examination of the hallucination hypothesis from a medical perspective certainly seems warranted.Ī hallucination is an experience involving one or more of the five senses in the absence of external stimuli that the conscious mind perceives as real. Consequently, books and articles advocating the hallucination hypothesis have not been subjected to the specialized readership of medical peer review. The hallucination hypothesis has significant medical implications yet its main proponents are critical New Testament scholars, not physicians. Collectively, such explanations have become known as the hallucination hypothesis for Jesus’s resurrection. Could their belief in Jesus’s resurrection be the after-effect of hallucinations?Īs a naturalistic alternative for the biblical accounts of the resurrection, some skeptical scholars propose that the disciples’ post-crucifixion meetings with Jesus were actually various kinds of hallucinatory psychological phenomena. The disciples unanimously believed Jesus had resurrected. Jesus’s disciples and many of his friends met him after his resurrection, too many to easily explain away ( 1 Cor. All of Jesus’s friends watched his ignominious and grisly death ( Luke 23:49). The resurrection of Jesus to bodily life after death by crucifixion is a foundational belief of orthodox Christianity. Were the disciples hallucinating when they met Jesus after his crucifixion? Do psychiatric disorders explain the disciples’ belief in Jesus’s resurrection?
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