Stop me if you have heard this one. A school kid needs to take a test. Just before it’s time to leave, the child proclaims they are sick. They don’t feel good, stomach hurts, headache. Suddenly a thermometer is produced with a reading that would send a human being to the hospital, stat! But then it is explained that today is Pizza Day for lunch, there is a book fair, and the kiddo has $20 to spend, their friend’s mother is bringing in cupcakes, and the whole class is getting an extra-long exercise hour. This is all happening today, “and you will miss it if you can’t be there.” Suddenly, the kiddo is healed of all maladies, and they are ready to face the day, test or not. The younger sibling comes up and says in the ear of the “healed” kiddo, “Faker!” 

Starting in the 18th century, skeptics like this younger sibling launched a scholarly effort to reconstruct an “authentic” as opposed to a “theological” picture of the life and ministry of Jesus. This Historical Jesus “movement” was a product of Enlightenment skepticism that intended to present a “historically accurate” Jesus that was to stand over against established, orthodox Christology. In some cases, historical facts were separated from supernatural events, looking for “natural explanations” of miracles and wonders. Even Thomas Jefferson pieced together a version of the New Testament “shorn of any sign of the miraculous or supernatural in order to leave just the life and teachings of Jesus behind.” 

The resurrection was one of those difficult, supernatural events. How could a dead man being raised to life again have happened “naturally?” If you have been reading past Compass articles, you have read three accounts that have been used to explain the unexplainable. Yet one more way to explain the resurrection of Jesus Christ was that he didn’t really die on the cross at all. Perhaps, advocates of this view suppose, he just passed out or he swooned. When Jesus “gave up the ghost,” crying out, “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit,” he merely fell unconscious. 

Jesus had suffered beatings at the hands of the Sanhedrin guards, and a vicious Roman flogging. Then he carried his cross about 400 yards (1/4 mile) to the place where Simon of Cyrene takes it from his exhausted hands. What person could survive this? After all this, having been crucified, without flinching, he suffers the pierce of a Roman Pilum releasing blood and water and is taken down from the cross. If Jesus survived, this was indeed a miracle. 

Ignore the blood and water at the piercing of his side, a sign of mortality, and consider that after his torture, he supposedly had the strength to roll away that stone from the tomb. 

If all this was a lie—if Jesus simply swooned upon the cross and never died to begin with—C.S. Lewis is correct: Jesus Christ is the most diabolical person in history. Given the evidence amassed above, the so-called Swoon Theory would have required just as much supernatural intervention as his resurrection did. Needless to say, Jesus wasn’t faking it. He was not unconscious, he was dead. 

It is unlikely that anyone reading this here thinks that Jesus just passed out and escaped. Nonetheless, there are those with whom we will share the faith who may have heard this lie. The spirit of skepticism is very much alive, and lots of folks want to fit Jesus into the smallness of their imagination. The events of Easter are daunting, frightening, and amazing. No one gets out without dealing with the love that raised Jesus—not from unconsciousness, not from a swoon, but from death to life. Jesus is not faking it. He is alive! 

And Lazarus said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ Abraham said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’” Luke 16:30-31 

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” the old adage goes. And yet Christians stand each Sunday and declare in unison the “mystery of faith”: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. 

None of us, like the Apostle Thomas, have placed our hands in his wounds. 

None of us, like Mary Magdalene, have spoken to our risen Lord. 

Still, Christians around the world declare that the turning point in history is the resurrection of the God-man, Jesus Christ. This is one response to the good news of Easter: He is Risen! 

And yet, others respond with disbelief. Skepticism toward the resurrection of Jesus is not a product of Modernism. The Christian narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection has been, for millennia, considered to be one of the greatest conspiracy theories ever wrought. 

This Eastertide, our Weekly Compass series will focus on the incomprehensible mystery of our Savior’s resurrection from the dead. We will explore and attempt to debunk what we consider to be the four major theories against the literal and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. In our final article, just before Pentecost, Fr. Chase will explain why Christians believe that Jesus Christ really did “trample down death by death,” that his physical resurrection upended the cosmos, and that our lives are irrevocably changed as a result. 

The Hallucination Theory 

When Elvis Presley died unexpectedly in 1977 at the young age of 42, the rock-and-roll world was devastated. Almost immediately, conspiracy theories emerged, claiming that the news of Elvis’s death was a cover. In actuality, he had been placed in the Witness Protection Program due to his ties to the Mafia. Elvis was alive, theorists contended, and people would see him haunting the halls of Graceland for years to come. 

These theories continued well beyond Elvis’s death. The cover of the July 1991 edition of the Weekly World News proclaims the following headline: “New Wave of Elvis Sightings!” After having allegedly appeared as a background actor in the beloved 1990 Christmas classic, Home Alone, Elvis was showing up all over the place. So insistent were the claims that the director of Home Alone had to make an appearance on USA Today to declare, “If Elvis was on the set, I would have known.” 

The obvious question here is: why? Why were people so certain that they were seeing Elvis and not someone who simply looked like him? What could explain these sightings? Perhaps, some reasoned, grieving fans were simply seeing visions of Elvis. In other words, perhaps they were hallucinating.  

The disciples of Jesus have faced similar charges as skeptics and believers alike have tried to make sense of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. The baseline of all theories of the resurrection is this: human beings die, and when they die, they cannot come back to life. Any appearance of a dead person must either mean a) the witness is lying, b) the witness is deceived, or c) the dead person didn’t really die. Advocates for the Hallucination Theory suggest that the apostles (and others) who witnessed Jesus in his resurrection body were deceived. Their visions of Jesus after his resurrection were just that—visions, or hallucinations. They continually thought they saw Jesus, whom they loved, because their minds could not accept the trauma of Jesus’s death. Indeed, if you saw a deceased loved one walking down 20th Street, you might at first shake your head to try to clear the image. Nevertheless, the number of witnesses, the nature of a hallucination, and the absence of Christ’s corpse pose major problems for the validity of the Hallucination Theory. 

Problem #1: There were too many witnesses.  

 The New Testament describes several separate appearances of Christ in his resurrected body including multiple appearances to different groups of his disciples, individuals like Mary Magdalene, and, most noteworthily, to the crowd of 500 (1 Cor. 15:3-8). The multiplicity of witnesses undermines the Hallucination Theory, as group hallucinations are unattested in psychological literature. In the words of Dr. Peter Kreeft, “Even three different witnesses are enough for a kind of psychological trigonometry; over five hundred is about as public as you can wish.” 

Moreover, many of these witnesses were accessible to recipients of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Should anyone from the Corinthian Church doubt their experience, Paul writes, they could freely ask one of the 500 witnesses who were mostly still alive. This is likewise the case for the apostles, who used their eyewitness testimony to teach and preach about Jesus’s resurrection until their own deaths. 

Problem #2: The witnesses’ experiences were inconsistent with the nature of a hallucination.  

A hallucination is, in the words of the American Psychological Association, “a false sensory perception that has a compelling sense of reality despite the absence of an external stimulus.” Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances do not qualify for the description, “hallucination,” because they contain many external stimuli. The two most noteworthy examples of these external stimuli are contained in John 20 and Luke 24. 

In John 20:24-29, Jesus appears to his disciples, including Thomas. Thomas, grieving, expresses his inability to believe in Jesus’s resurrection without external, sensory evidence. Jesus appears, inviting Thomas to place his fingers into the nail marks on his hands and the wound in his side. Thus, what others might dismiss as Thomas’s “hallucination” becomes an empirical, sensory experience due to the external stimulus of his hands connecting with Jesus’s flesh. 

Likewise, in Luke 24, Jesus invites the disciples into an experience of his physical presence when, again, he invites them to touch his resurrected body. Jesus then ups the ante by sitting down by a fire and eating fish with them. Hallucinations do not eat. Jesus, in his resurrected form, was capable of consuming and digesting food, negating the possibility that he was a mere figment of the disciples’ imagination (bereaved or otherwise). 

 Problem #3: There was no corpse.  

Finally, and perhaps most compellingly, is the fact that the tomb was empty on Easter morning. If the disciples and other witnesses were hallucinating, there should still have been a corpse in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. The Jews and the Roman government could have silenced the absurd claims of the apostles by producing Jesus’s dead body. Nevertheless, no body was ever found. 

These three primary problems refute the Hallucination Theory as it has been presented. Because many witnesses defied the definition of a hallucination and had experiential encounters with the resurrected Lord, the Hallucination Theory holds no weight in its attempt to disprove Christ’s resurrection. Still, other theories make extravagant claims about body-snatching, myth-making, and conspiratorial maneuvering. Stay tuned next week as Fr. John Laffoon explores the Myth Theory.