Vision theory of Jesus' appearances

The vision theory or vision hypothesis is a term used to cover a range of theories that question the physical resurrection of Jesus, and suggest that sightings of a risen Jesus were visionary experiences, often classified as grief or bereavement visions. It was first formulated by David Friedrich Strauss in the 19th century, and has been proposed in several forms by critical contemporary scholarship, including Helmut Koester, Géza Vermes, and Larry Hurtado, and members of the Jesus Seminar such as Gerd Lüdemann.

Christian apologists, scholars, and theologians reject the theory, holding the resurrection to be an actual bodily phenomenon.

Subjective vision theory
Origen's response to the second century philosopher Celsus provides the earliest known literary record of a vision hypothesis; it was later popularized by 19th century theologian David Strauss. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), in his Life of Jesus (1835), argued that the resurrection was not an objective historical fact, but a subjective "recollection" of Jesus, transfiguring the dead Jesus into an imaginary, or "mythical," risen Christ. The appearance, or Christophany, of Jesus to Paul and others, was "internal and subjective." Reflection on the Messianic hope, and Psalms 16:10, led to an exaltated state of mind, in which "the risen Christ" was present "in a visionary manner," concluding that Jesus must have escaped the bondage of death. Strauss' thesis was further developed by Ernest Renan (1863) and Albert Réville (1897). These interpretations were later classed the "subjective vision hypothesis", and is advocated today in secular and Liberal Christian scholarship.

According to Ehrman, "the Christian view of the matter [is] that the visions were bona fide appearances of Jesus to his followers", a view which is "forcefully stated in any number of publications." Ehrman further notes that "Christian apologists sometimes claim that the most sensible historical explanation for these visions is that Jesus really appeared to the disciples."

According to De Conick, the experiences of the risen Christ in the earliest written sources – the "primitive Church" creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:8 and Galatians 1:16 – are ecstatic rapture events.

Paula Fredriksen, an agnostic scholar, expressed strong support for the vision theory, saying that “I know in their own terms what they [the disciples] saw was the raised Jesus. That's what they say, and then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that's what they saw. (...) I don't know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian that they must have seen something.”

Exaltation of Jesus
According to Hurtado, the resurrection experiences were religious experiences which "seem to have included visions of (and/or ascents to) God's heaven, in which the glorified Christ was seen in an exalted position." These visions may mostly have appeared during corporate worship. Johan Leman contends that the communal meals provided a context where participants entered a state of mind in which the presence of Jesus was felt; during these meals Jesus’ followers presumably experienced visions of their master or heard his voice. Leman also adheres to cognitive dissonance theory as an alternative explanation for the visions.

According to Ehrman, "the disciples' belief in the resurrection was based on visionary experiences." Ehrman notes that both Jesus and his early followers were apocalyptic Jews, who believed in the bodily resurrection, which would start when the coming of God's Kingdom was near. Ehrman further notes that visions usually have a strong persuasive power, but that the Gospel accounts also record a tradition of doubt about the appearances of Jesus. Ehrman's "tentative suggestion" is that only a few followers had visions, including Peter, Paul, Mary and probably James. They told others about those visions, convincing most of their close associates that Jesus was raised from the dead, but not all of them. Eventually, these stories were retold and embellished, leading to the story that all disciples had seen the risen Jesus. The belief in Jesus' resurrection radically changed their perceptions, concluding from his absence that he must have been transmitted to heaven, by God himself, exalting him to an unprecedented status and authority.

Morton Smith, in his book Jesus the Magician, holds that the apostles learned from their master the ability to induce visions and hallucinations. According to him, shortly after Jesus' demise some of his followers had visionary or mystical experiences where they saw their master risen, leading to the resurrection belief.

Call to missionary activity
According to Helmut Koester, the stories of the resurrection were originally epiphanies in which the disciples are called to a ministry by the risen Jesus, and at a secondary stage were interpreted as physical proof of the event. He contends that the more detailed accounts of the resurrection are also secondary and do not come from historically trustworthy sources, but instead belong to the genre of the narrative types.

According to Gerd Lüdemann, Peter had a vision of Jesus, induced by his feelings of guilt of betraying Jesus. The vision elevated this feeling of guilt, and Peter experienced it as a real appearance of Jesus, raised from dead. He convinced the other disciples that the resurrection of Jesus signalled that the endtime was near and God's Kingdom was coming, when the dead would rise again, as evidenced by Jesus. This revitalized the disciples, spurring their new mission.

According to Biblical scholar Géza Vermes, some disciples (not necessarily the apostles) had visions or hallucinations of a risen Jesus shortly after his death. The tales of these ‘apparitions’, and potentially the discovery of the empty tomb, encouraged and “illuminated” the dreaded apostles “like a ray of hope”, and eventually induced in them a "powerful mystical or visionary experience". The resurrection is thus to be understood as a “resurrection in the heart”: a reviving of the self-confidence of the followers of Jesus under the influence of the Spirit, "prompting them to resume their apostolic mission." They felt the presence of Jesus in their own actions, "rising again, today and tomorrow, in the hearts of the men who love him and feel he is near.”

Objective vision theory
Hans Grass (1964) proposed an "objective vision hypothesis," in which Jesus' appearances are "divinely caused visions," showing his followers that his resurrection "was a spiritual reality." Jesus' spirit was resurrected, but his body remained dead, explaining the belated conversion of Jesus' half-brother James. Grass' "objective" vision hypothesis finds no echo in more recent scholarship.

Cognitive dissonance reduction
A further explanation is provided by the theory of cognitive dissonance, which implies that Jesus’ post-mortem visions might not have been the origin of resurrection belief, but its confirmation in the eyes of the disciples. While Jesus' early followers expected the immediate installment of the Kingdom of God, the delay of this cosmic event led to a change in beliefs. According to a naturalistic explanation, in a process of cognitive dissonance reduction, Jewish scriptures were re-interpreted to explain the crucifixion and visionary post-mortem experiences of Jesus. The belief that Jesus' resurrection signaled the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God changed into a belief that the resurrection (i.e. the visions) confirmed the Messianic status of Jesus, and the belief that Jesus would return at some indeterminate time in the future, the Second Coming c.q. Parousia, heralding the expected endtime. The same process may have led to intensive proselytization, convincing others of the developing beliefs to reduce cognitive dissonance, explaining why the early group of followers grew larger despite the failing expectations.

John Gager, one of the first proposers of cognitive dissonance’s application to the growth of early Christianity, holds that the visionary experiences (and possibly lucid dreams) of the risen Jesus were the perceived ‘proofs’ that ‘resolved’ the cognitive dissonance itself.

Cognitive-dissonance-induced rationalization
A more recent variant of the aforementioned theory. Kris Komarnitsky, one the first proposers of this theory, says that while most scholars consider the resurrection belief a consequence of grief or bereavement visions, it is possible that the resurrection belief actually preceded and induced the post-mortem visions of Jesus. According to Komarnitsky, the cognitive dissonance reduction and a staunch refusal to accept Jesus’ death might have originated the resurrection belief, followed by visions (and possibly dreams) of Jesus after his death, which the disciples considered the confirmation of their belief.

Interpretation of doubt in the visions
According to Bart Ehrman, there is an intrinsic leitmotif of doubt in Jesus’ post-mortem visions, which he called a “doubt tradition”: Mary mistakes the risen Jesus for a gardener, the disciples initially doubt Jesus’ resurrection, and in another episode fail to recognise him until he reaches the shore and talks with them; other examples are episode of doubting Thomas and the disciples of Emmaus, who fail to recognise Jesus till he shares his bread with them.

Most scholars have not delved into the question. Others, such as Morton Smith and Géza Vermes, have simply concluded that, since disciples had ‘visions’ of Jesus, it was normal for them to doubt what they had seen. The elements of doubt eventually remained in the tales.

However, Bart Ehrman notes that this explanation is unlikely, as medical literature suggests that “people who have visions tend to believe them wholeheartedly”. According to Ehrman, there are too many elements of doubt in the tales to consider the aforementioned theory likely. As a result, he offers a “temptation suggestion”: while several of Jesus’ followers were convinced of their master’s resurrection by the tales of the disciples who effectively had post-mortem visions, some followers might not have believed them. Over time they either left or “ran away”, and the stories were embellished to make it seem that all the disciples eventually believed in the resurrection visions. Ehrman says the “doubt tradition” may be very old, possibly as old as the visions themselves, which he and various scholars date not further than the first or second year after Jesus’ crucifixion.

Leonard Irwin Eisenberg proposes a variant of the vision theory to explain the “doubt tradition”. Basing his observations on medical literature, he says that some disciples, overwhelmed with grief and pain, might have experienced “mistaken identity” visions: they were deeply convinced to see Jesus, gaze his face or hear his voice, while in reality they were simply seeing or hearing other people. Eisenberg explains therefore several episodes of doubt, such as the apostles and the Emmaus’ disciples not recognising Jesus, or Mary mistaking a gardener for Jesus. He also notes that, in some cases, the characters start to recognise Jesus when the person they are talking to shows kindness toward them or performs a special gesture, such as breaking bread: the kindness of that person would therefore remind them of Jesus’ kindness, inducing the hallucination. According to Eisenberg’s theory, over time Jesus’ followers started encouraging each other to see Jesus’ face in other people faces and hear his voice, leading to a self-propagating cycle of Jesus’ sightings.

Criticism
Several Christian scholars such as Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig and Michael Morrison have argued against the vision explanations for the textual accounts of a physical resurrection. According to Habermas, most scholars on Christology are "moderate conservatives", who believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, either physically or spiritually. While the vision theory has gained support among critical scholars since the last quarter of the 20th century, "the vast majority of scholars" still reject the possibility of subjective visions or hallucinations as an explanation for the resurrection-experiences. Habermas himself views these critical approaches as "efforts to dismiss the central event and doctrine of orthodox Christianity".

According to British scholar N. T. Wright, visions of the dead were always associated with spirits and ghosts, and never with bodily resurrection. Thus, Wright argues, a mere vision of Jesus would never lead to the unprecedented belief that Jesus was a physically resurrected corpse; at most, he would be perceived as an exalted martyr standing at the right hand of God. Wright argues, "precisely because such encounters [visions of the dead] were reasonably well known [...] they [the disciples] could not possibly, by themselves, have given rise to the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead [...] Indeed, such visions meant precisely, as people in the ancient and modern worlds have discovered, that the person was dead, not that they were alive." Similarly, Wright calls the cognitive dissonance theory "widely discredited" and criticizes it on the basis that "nobody was expecting anyone, least of all a Messiah, to rise from the dead. A crucified Messiah was a failed Messiah. When Simon bar Kokhba was killed by the Romans in AD 135, nobody went around afterwards saying he really was the Messiah after all."

Dale Allison has expressed similar criticisms, and has argued that visions alone would never lead to the belief in a bodily resurrection. He writes "If there was no reason to believe that his [Jesus's] solid body had returned to life, no one would have thought him, against expectation, resurrected from the dead. Certainly visions of or perceived encounters with a postmortem Jesus would not by themselves, have supplied such reason."

While some scholars such as Ehrman have doubted the veracity of the number of witnesses, others such as C.H. Dodd have noted the antiquity of narratives concerning the postmortem appearances of Jesus, citing the sermons in Acts 10 which report that the risen Jesus ate and drank with the disciples which lack influence from Pauline theology or vocabulary and containing a high degree of semitism, lacking resemblance to the rest of Acts and Luke, indicating it comes from a much earlier tradition. Similarly, the Pauline creed preserved in 1 Cor. 15 is most commonly dated to no more than five years after Jesus' death by Biblical scholars and contains numerous postmortem appearances of Jesus. Likewise, in his evaluation of the vision theory, Allison notes that the number of witnesses raises "legitimate questions, and waving the magic wand of 'mass hysteria' will not make them vanish." According to the historian A.N. Sherwin-White, “For these stories to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be unbelievable; more generations are needed… The span of two generations is too short to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical fact.”

According to Wright, Paul "believed he had seen the risen Jesus in person, and [...] his understanding of who this Jesus was included the firm belief that he possessed a transformed but still physical body." Similarly, James Ware notes that the verb for "raised" (εγειρω) used by Paul in 1 Cor. 15 is only ever used to describe one or another kind of action involving the raising up, rising up, or setting up of something or someone from a prone or seated position to an upright, standing position. And as paraphrased by Larry Hurtado, that the verb here refers to an ascension of Jesus, a transportation of him in some “spiritual” mode to heavenly glory, is ruled out.

William Lane Craig holds that the resurrection appearances are far too diverse to be classified as hallucinations; Craig and Lüdemann entered a written debate on the subject in 2000. German Biblical scholar Martin Hengel notes that Lüdemann's theory transcends the limits of historical research, by providing an analysis which is not verifiable. Craig argues that there is "not a single instance in the casebooks exhibiting the diversity involved in the postmortem appearances of Jesus. Mike Licona similarly cites psychologist Dr. Gary Sibcy that visionary explanations for the resurrection lack sufficient scientific support. Additionally, Licona and other scholars point out that the vision theory does not account for the conversions of followers such as James, the brother but also disbeliever of Jesus, and of Paul, a persecutor of the early Christians.

In an early critique of the vision hypothesis, George Park Fisher notes that Jesus' followers had their hopes crushed by his crucifixion, and that this would not have been a "preparation of mind for such a delusion as the hallucination theory implies." He argues further that such a theory is "shut out by one remarkable peculiarity" that "they took place, as Paul's testimony shows, at intervals and in a different number."