DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? PART 8

                                          DID JESUS RISE              FROM THE DEAD?

         PART 8

       (copied from
         Y-Jesus.com)


Were the Disciples Hallucinating?

People still think they see a fat, Grey-haired
Elvis ducking into Dunkin Donuts. And then there are those who believe they spent last night with aliens in the mother ship being subjected to  unspeakable testing.

 Sometimes certain people can "see " things they want to, things that aren't really there. And that is why some have claimed that the disciples were so distraught over the crucifixion that their desire to see Jesus alive caused mass hallucination. Plausible?

Psychologist Gary Collins, former president of the American Association of Christian Counselors, was asked about the possibility that hallucinations were behind the apostles' radically changed behavior. Collins remarked  "Hallucinations are individual occurrences.  By their very nature, only one person can see a given hallucination at a time. They certainly aren't something which  can be seen  by a group of people."

Hallucination is not even a remote possibility according to psychologist Thomas J. Thorburn.
"It is absolutely inconceivable that ... five hundred persons  of  average soundness of mind... should experience all sorts of sensuous impressions - visual, auditory, tactual,  - and that all these .... experiences should rest entirely upon hallucination."

Furthermore, in the psychology of  hallucinations, the person would have to be in a frame of mind where they so wished to see that person that their mind contrives it.  Two major leaders of the early Church, James and Paul, both state forcefully that they encountered a resurrected Jesus, neither expecting or hoping for the pleasure. The apostle Paul, in fact, led the earliest persecutions of Christians, and his conversion remains inexplicable, except for his own testimony that Jesus appeared to him, resurrected.

The hallucination theory then, appears to be another dead end. What else could explain away the resurrection? 

From Lie to Legend

Some unconvinced skeptics attribute the resurrection story to a legend that began with one or more persons lying or thinking they saw the  resurrected Jesus. Over time, the legend would have grown and been embellished as it was passed around. 

On the surface this
 seems like a plausible
 scenario. But, there are
 three major problems 
with that theory.

*  First, legends simply don't develop 
    while multiple eyewitnesses are alive 
    to refute them.
    One historian, of Ancient Rome and
    Greece, A.N. Sherwin-White, argued
    that : the resurrection news spread 
    too soon and too quickly for it to have 
    been a legend.

*  Second, legends develop by oral 
    tradition and don't come with 
    contemporary historical documents 
    that can be verified. Yet the 
    Gospels were written within three 
    decades of the resurrection.

*  Third, the legend theory doesn't
    adequately explain either the fact of 
    the empty tomb or the verified 
    conviction of the apostles that Jesus 
    was alive.

Therefore, the legend theory doesn't seem to hold up any better than other attempts to explain away this amazing claim. Furthermore, the resurrection account of Jesus Christ actually altered history, beginning with the Roman Empire. 

How could a legend make such an enormous historical impact within such a short time period? 

next post 23rd August