CHAPTER 14:
HALLUCINATION
HYPOTHESIS
Back in 1835, in his book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, the German biblical critic David Friedrich Strauss proposed that the resurrection appearances were merely hallucinations on the disciples’ part. The most prominent defender of the Hallucination Hypothesis today is the German New Testament critic Gerd Ludemann. How does it fare when assessed by our criteria?
1. Explanatory scope: The Hallucination Hypothesis has inadequate explanatory scope. First, it says nothing to explain the empty tomb. Therefore, one must either deny the fact of the empty tomb (and, therefore, the burial as well) or else conjoin an independent hypothesis to the Hallucination Hypothesis to account for the empty tomb.
Second, the Hallucination Hypothesis fails to explain the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Some scholars have made a great deal out of the alleged similarities between the post-mortem appearances of Jesus and visions of recently departed loved ones on the part of bereaved persons. But while such visions are certainly intriguing, the overriding lesson of such experiences is that the bereaved do not as a result of such visions—however real and tangible they may seem—conclude that their deceased loved one has come physically back to life. Rather, the bereaved believe that they have seen their deceased loved one in the afterlife. As N. T. Wright observes, for someone in the ancient world, visions of the deceased were not taken as evidence that the person is alive, but as evidence that he is dead!
Moreover, in a Jewish context there are more appropriate interpretations of such experiences besides resurrection. Were the disciples to project visions of Jesus after his death, then—given Jewish beliefs about life after death—they would have seen Jesus in heaven or in Abraham’s bosom, where Jews believed the souls of the righteous dead went to abide until the final resurrection. Such visions would not have led, however, to belief in Jesus’ resurrection; at the most, it would have only led the disciples to say that Jesus had been assumed into heaven, not raised from the dead.
In Jewish thinking, an assumption into heaven is not the same as a resurrection. Assumption is God’s taking someone bodily out of this world into heaven; for example, in the Old Testament stories of Enoch and Elijah, these men did not die but were taken directly into heaven by God. A dead person might also be assumed into heaven. In an extra-biblical Jewish writing called The Testament of Job (40), the story is told of two children killed in the collapse of a house. When the rescuers clear away the rubble, the bodies of the children are nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, their mother sees a vision of the two children glorified in heaven, where God has taken them up.
In contrast to assumption into heaven, the Jewish conception of resurrection is God’s raising up of a dead person in the space-time universe. The person is not taken out of this world, but raised up in it. Assumption and resurrection are, therefore, distinct categories in Jewish thought.
Given Jewish beliefs concerning assumption and resurrection, the discovery of the empty tomb and hallucinations of Jesus would at most have caused the disciples to think that Jesus had been assumed into glory, for this was consistent with their Jewish frame of thought. But they wouldn’t have come to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, for this fundamentally contradicted Jewish beliefs about the resurrection of the dead. Thus, even given hallucinations, belief in Jesus’ resurrection remains unexplained.
2. Explanatory power: Not only does the Hallucination Hypothesis say nothing to explain the empty tomb and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, but it also has weak explanatory power even when it comes to explaining the appearances. Let’s suppose that Peter experienced a guilt-induced vision of Jesus, as Ludemann imagines, or, more plausibly, was one of those people who experience a vision of a deceased loved one. Would this supposition suffice to explain the resurrection appearances? Not really, for the diversity of the appearances bursts the bounds of anything found in the psychological casebooks. Think about it: Jesus appeared not just one time, but many times; not at just one locale and under one circumstance, but at a variety of places and under a variety of circumstances; not to just one individual, but to different persons; not just to individuals, but to various groups; not just to believers, but to unbelievers . . . and even enemies. Positing a chain reaction among the disciples won’t solve the problem, because people like James and Paul don’t stand in the chain; so those who would explain the resurrection appearances psychologically have to construct a composite picture by cobbling together different, unrelated cases of hallucinatory experiences. The necessity of this expedient only serves to underline the fact that there’s nothing like the resurrection appearances in the psychological casebooks.
3. Plausibility: Ludemann attempts to make his Hallucination Hypothesis plausible by means of psychoanalyses of Peter and Paul. He believes that they both labored under guilt complexes, which found release in the hallucinations of Jesus. But Lude-mann’s psychoanalysis is implausible for at least three reasons: First, Ludemann’s use of depth psychology is based upon certain theories of Jung and Freud, which are widely rejected. Second, there’s not enough information to do psychoanalyses of Peter or Paul. Psychoanalysis is difficult enough to carry out even with patients on the psychoanalyst’s couch, so to speak, but it’s next to impossible with historical figures. That’s why historians reject the genre of psychobiography today. Finally, third, the evidence we do have suggests that Paul did not struggle with a guilt complex as Ludemann supposes.
Nearly fifty years ago, the Swedish scholar Krister Stendahl pointed out that Western readers have tended to read Paul through the lenses of Martin Luther’s struggles with guilt and sin. But Paul (or Saul) the Pharisee experienced no such struggle. Stendahl writes:
Contrast Paul, a very happy and successful Jew, one who can say ‘As to righteousness under the Law (I was) blameless’ (Phil. 3.6). That is what he says. He experiences no troubles, no problems, and no qualms of conscience. He is a star pupil, the student to get the thousand dollar graduate scholarship in Gamaliel’s Seminary.... Nowhere in Paul’s writings is there any indication . . . that psychologically Paul had some problem of conscience.18
In order to justify his portrait of a guilt-ridden Paul, Lude-mann is compelled to interpret Romans 7 as a description of Paul’s pre-Christian experience. But since the late 1920s, almost all commentators have rejected this autobiographical interpretation of Romans 7, so Ludemann’s psychoanalysis is positively implausible.
A second way in which the Hallucination Hypothesis is implausible is by its designating the appearances to be merely visionary experiences. Ludemann recognizes that the Hallucination Hypothesis stands or falls on the assumption that what Paul experienced on the Damascus Road was the same as what all the other disciples experienced; but this assumption is groundless. In including himself in the list of eyewitnesses to Christ’s resurrection appearances, Paul in no way implies that the other appearances were just like the appearance he saw. Many of Paul’s opponents in Corinth denied that he was a true apostle, so Paul is anxious to include himself along with the other apostles who had seen Christ. Paul is trying to bring his experience on the Damascus Road up to the objectivity and reality of theirs, not to pull their experience down to merely visionary experiences.
So the Hallucination Hypothesis is implausible both with regard to its psychoanalysis of the witnesses and with regard to its blanket reduction of the appearances to visionary experiences.
4. Less contrived: Ludemann’s version of the Hallucination Hypothesis is contrived in a number of ways; for example, he assumes that the disciples fled back to Galilee after Jesus’ arrest; that Peter was so obsessed with guilt that he projected a hallucination of Jesus; that the other disciples were also prone to hallucinations; and that Paul had a struggle with the Jewish law, and a secret attraction to Christianity. There is no evidence for any of these assumptions.
5. Disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs: Some of the accepted beliefs of New Testament scholars today tend to disconfirm the Hallucination Hypothesis, at least in the way that Ludemann presents it. Examples include: the belief that Jesus was laid in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea; that Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty by women; that psychoanalysis of historical figures is not feasible; that Paul was basically content with his life under the Jewish law; and that the New Testament makes a distinction between a mere vision and a resurrection appearance.
6. Exceeds other hypotheses in fulfilling conditions 1—5: The Hallucination Hypothesis remains a live option today and in that respect, has outstripped its rivals. But the crucial question is whether it outstrips the Resurrection Hypothesis.