Easter Myths, Hallucinations and Conspiracies (Part 9)

In the last installment of this web series, we began to look at alternative theories regarding the stories of the appearances of the risen Christ found in the New Testament. We continue this time with more of the same:

3) The early Christians fashioned their resurrection appearance tales out of available Jewish and Greco-Roman mythology.

The trouble is that the Gospels show no signs at all of borrowing from any ancient myths that we know of. For example, from Jewish sources they could have borrowed elements from the story of the prophet Elijah’s assumption into heaven, and from Gentile sources they could have drawn upon the “apotheosis” myths (the raising of a man to divine or semi-divine status, e.g. the stories of Hercules, Oedipus, and Asclepius) — but there are no literary traces of borrowing from any of these tales. Early in the 20th century some scholars argued that the story of the resurrection of Jesus was simply a copy of the many ancient myths of the dying and rising of the Corn King, the god of the coming of the spring and of new life rising from the ground to produce the annual harvest. But scholars now know that those agricultural myths appeared only very late in antiquity, mostly from the 3rd century AD onward, and it is therefore more likely that they copied themes from Christian sources, than the other way around. Besides, the authors of the New Testament books, all of whom were of Jewish faith and background, would have been among the least likely people in the ancient world to revere and borrow from pagan myths and legends.

Gary Habermas and Michael Licona sum up the evidence for us:

“The first account of a dying and rising god that somewhat parallels the story of Jesus’ resurrection appeared at least 100 years after the reports of Jesus’ resurrection. The earliest versions of the death and resurrection of the Greek mythological figure Adonis appeared after A.D. 150. There are no accounts of a resurrection of Attis, the Phrygian god of vegetation who was responsible for the death and rebirth of plant life, until the end of the third century A.D. or later. Therefore, one cannot claim that the disciples were writing according to a contemporary literary style of dying and rising gods, since there is no literature contemporary to the disciples indicating that this was a genre of the period. …

“[T]he ancient Egyptian cult of Osiris is the only account of a god who survived death that predates Christianity. According to one version of the story, and there are several, Osiris was killed by his brother, chopped up into fourteen pieces and scattered throughout Egypt. The goddess Isis collected and reassembled his parts and brought him back to life. Unfortunately, she was only able to find thirteen pieces. Moreover, it is questionable whether Osiris was brought back to life on earth or seen by others as Jesus was. He was given a status as god of the gloomy underworld. So the picture we get of Osiris is that of a guy who does not have all of his parts and who maintains a shadowy existence as god of the mummies. … Osiris’s return to life was not a resurrection, but a zombification.” (The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, p. 90-91).

4) The sightings of the Risen Jesus were nothing more than wishful thinking resulting in collective hallucinations by his followers, delusions brought on not by hallucinogenic drugs, but by their extreme grief and sorrow at the death of their Master.

Problems with this theory abound. First, the hallucinations theory on it’s own cannot explain why the tomb of Jesus was found empty on Easter morning (more on that in future articles in this series). Second, the theory cannot explain the appearances of the risen Jesus to radical skeptics such as Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul) and James, the Lord’s brother or cousin. These people could not be the victims of grief-inspired delusions and the wishful thinking of “true-believers,” because they did not come to believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah, or become his followers at all, until after they had seen him risen from the grave. Third, hallucinations don’t eat. Fourth, hallucinations are not shared by multiple persons in detail any more than dreams are shared in that way. A group of people may experience hallucinations at the same time — but not exactly the same hallucinations. Fifth, collective hallucinations (if they even occur at all, which some experts doubt) occur in response to intense wishes and expectations, most especially the appearance of something or someone at a specified time and place. But the disciples were hardly disposed in this direction after what had happened on Calvary, and the sudden and unexpected appearances of Jesus at different times and places hardly fits the pattern of (alleged) collective hallucinations.

Some have argued that the disciples were indeed in a state of intense expectation of seeing their Lord risen from the grave. On the road to Jerusalem, Jesus had predicted three times that he would rise again on the third day. But the gospels tell us that the disciples did not have a clue what he meant by this, or simply did not believe it (Mk 8:31-33; 9:31-32; 14:27- 31; Lk 24: 13-24). Many of the ancient Jews held that there would be a general resurrection from the dead at the end of time, but no one expected that any individual, not even the Messiah, would anticipate this with a solo resurrection of his own. This was the thought-world occupied by the disciples of Jesus’ in his day. Thus, it is no wonder that they were simply bewildered by his statements about rising again on some cryptic or symbolic “third day.” Nor is it likely that the Gospel writers invented their incredulity. Putting the apostles in such a bad light — indeed, making them look completely “clueless” — is not the kind of thing that any early Christian writer would be likely to do (a violation of the principle of “embarrassment” discussed in our web series “In Search of Jesus of Nazareth,” Part Six) More likely, the evangelists had no choice other than to report the embarrassing facts about the behavior of the apostles, just because they really happened.

For a summary statement of all the improbabilities piled up with regard to this option, we can turn again to John Stott:

“Hallucinations have been known to occur in quite ordinary and normal people, and in such cases two characteristics may usually be discerned. First, they happen as the climax to a period of exaggerated wishful thinking. Second, the circumstances of time, place and mood are favorable. There must be a strong inward desire and the predisposing outward setting.

“When we turn to the Gospel narratives of the resurrection, however, both of these factors are missing. When the women first found the tomb empty, they fled in ‘trembling and astonishment’ and were ‘afraid.’ When Mary Magdalene and the other women reported that Jesus was alive, the apostles “would not believe it,’ and their words ‘seemed to them an idle tale.’ When Jesus himself came and stood in their midst ‘they were startled and frightened and supposed they saw a spirit,’ so that Jesus ‘upbraided them for their hardness of heart.’ Thomas was adamant in his refusal to believe unless he could actually see and feel the nail-wounds. When later Christ met the eleven and others by appointment on a mountain in Galilee, ‘they worshipped him, but some doubted.’ Here was no wishful thinking, no naïve credulity, no blind acceptance. The disciples were not gullible, but rather cautious, skeptical and ‘slow of heart to believe.’ They were not susceptible to hallucinations. Nor would strange visions have satisfied them. Their faith was grounded upon the hard facts of verifiable experience.

“Not only so, but the outwardly favorable circumstances were missing too. If the appearances had all taken place in one or two particularly sacred places, which had been hallowed by memories of Jesus, and their mood had been expectant, our suspicions might well be aroused. If we had only the story of the appearances in the upper room, we should have cause to doubt and question. If the eleven had been gathered in that special place where Jesus had spent with them some of his last earthly hours, and they had kept his place vacant, and were sentimentalizing over the magic days of the past, and had remembered his promises to return, and had begun to wonder if he might return and to hope that he would, until the ardor of their expectation was consummated by his sudden appearance, we might indeed fear that they had been mocked by a cruel delusion.

“But this was not the case. Indeed, an investigation of the ten appearances reveals an almost studied variety in the circumstances of person, place and mood in which they occurred. He was seen by individuals alone (Mary Magadalene, Peter and James), by small groups and by more than five hundred people together. He appeared in the garden of the tomb, near Jerusalem, in the upper room, on the road to Emmaus, by the lake of Galilee, on a Galilean mountain and on the Mount of Olives.

“If there was variety of person and place, there was a variety of mood also. Mary Magdalene was weeping; the women were afraid and astonished; Peter was full of remorse; and Thomas of incredulity. The Emmaus pair were distracted by the events of the week, and the disciples in Galilee by their fishing. Yet through their doubts and fears, through their unbelief and preoccupation, the risen Lord made himself known to them.’ (Basic Christianity, p. 69-71)

5) The disciples themselves stole the body from the tomb and invented the story that they had seen Jesus alive.

This theory never dies, although it is hard to understand why it ever lived in the first place. To begin with, one of the Gospels tells us that the Roman soldiers had posted a guard at the tomb (Mt 27:62-66), so how did the disciples get past that first obstacle? Also, there must have been a fairly large number of people involved in this plot (all of the apostles, and many of the women who followed him). And how did they convince or trick hardened skeptics into believing he was risen from the dead (such as James, the Lord’s brother, and Saul of Tarsus; on James see Mk 4:21, Jn 7:5; I Cor 15:7)? How did they dupe more than five-hundred people at once (I Cor 15:6), many of whom, St. Paul says, were still alive in his day, and (by implication) could be questioned about what they saw, so certain were they that they had seen the risen Lord? Moreover, why did the early Christians begin their (allegedly fictional) Easter stories by telling of an empty tomb discovered by women (given that women were not considered to be reliable witnesses in court among the Jews in those days), and of the appearance to Mary Magdalene (a person who had been at one time possessed by many demons — in other words, at the very least someone with mental health issues)? Finally, and most importantly, what could they possibly have hoped to gain from fabricating the resurrection of their Master, except what most of them actually got: prison sentences, beatings, ostracism from the Jewish community, and ultimately martyrdom. People with religious zeal will give their lives for all kinds of false beliefs and ideologies. They do not willingly give their lives for something they know very well to be a lie — not without at least some of them attempting to save themselves from persecution and death by revealing the hoax for what it was. But we have no record that any of them ever did.

Chris Price discusses this theory in depth in his book Radical Hope:

“Brave or foolish people may die for things they believe to be true, or for other noble reasons, but no sane individual dies for something they know to be false. It has been pointed out to me that, in the Second World War, members of the French underground would lie to the Nazis and die defending that lie in order to conceal information from their enemy. They fabricated a story and willingly died for the deception. This historical example seems like an exception to my claim, but it actually reinforces the point I am making. The collusion of the members involved in the French underground likely saved countless lives, helping many people escape Nazi deaths squads, and we have acknowledged already that brave individuals will die for noble causes.

“The disciples’ situation was entirely different. For the disciples no lives were spared by telling lies about Jesus’ resurrection, rather, lives would only be wasted by this tall-tale, including their own lives, spent frivolously propagating falsehoods until they were silenced by death.” (p. 59-60)

Price then goes on to quote the 4th century historian Eusebius, who fittingly summed up the absurdity of the conspiracy theory with these sarcastic words, which he placed in the mouths of the disciples themselves:

“Let us band together to invent all the miracles and resurrection appearances which we never saw and let us carry the shame even to death! Why not die for nothing! Why dislike torture and whipping inflicted for no good reason? Let us go into all the nations and overthrow their institutions and denounce their gods. Even if we don’t convince anybody, at least we will have the satisfaction of drawing down on ourselves the punishment for our own deceit.” (p.65)

Next Time: The Most Disturbing Words that Jesus Ever Spoke

Robert Stackpole, STD
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