DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD (9)

                                          DID JESUS RISE             FROM THE DEAD                     (9)

     {copied from 
      Y-Jesus.com}



Were the Disciples hallucinating?

People still think they see a fat, gray-haired Elvis darting 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's 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 disciples 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 kinds of sensuous impressions - visual, auditory, factual - and all of these ... experiences should rest entirely upon hallucinations.

Furthermore, in the psychology of hallucinations, the person would have to be in a frame of mind where they so wished to see the 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 prosecutions 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 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 the fact of the 
   empty tomb or the historically 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 with such a short time period?

next post  1st February