Was the resurrection of Jesus an illusion? I’m not saying
that it was, but on this blog you should expect such questions to be asked.
A famous fundamentalist evangelist of the 1970s was Josh McDowell,
who was well known for turning the piercing light of logic upon the Christian
religion and proclaiming that its fundamental tenets had passed the test of
credibility. Most famously, he posed the question of Jesus’ divinity. If Jesus
was not Lord, then He must have been a liar, for He claimed that He was, or a
lunatic, for believing Himself to be. Lord, liar, or lunatic—a catchy phrase.
Catchy but wrong. If, in fact, you can eliminate the liar
and lunatic options for Jesus, then the only possible conclusion is “Lord,”
which is true only if McDowell considered all
the possibilities. But there is a fourth possibility: the resurrection was an
illusion, which people wanted so badly to believe that their minds created the
beliefs.
This does not mean that the early Christians, or their
successors, were lunatics. Perfectly normal people can have illusions; they
become lunatics only if the illusion overwhelms their common sense ability to
function in society. I will use a couple of examples from the Catholic Church,
which is actually less prone to
illusion than many fundamentalist sects.
First, consider the “miracle of Lourdes.” In 1858, a girl
named Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in a grotto
near Lourdes in southern France. Not once, but eighteen times. Two of the
things the Virgin told her were, first, that she (not just Jesus) had been
immaculately (asexually, presumably through mitosis) conceived, and second,
that if believers would dig a hole at the base of the grotto they would release
a spring of water that would have healing properties.
Consider the claim about the immaculate conception of
Mary. Some people say that this had to be revealed by the Virgin herself to
Mlle. Bernadette, because Pope Pius IX had not declared this doctrine until
1854, only four little tiny years before Mlle. Bernadette’s visions, and during
those four brief years Mlle. Bernadette could not have possibly heard about it.
Of course, she most certainly could
have known about it.
There is a spring from the grotto and it ejects enough
water that people can go swimming in it. And millions have done so. The grotto
of Lourdes has had 200 million visitors since 1860. Claims have been made that
the waters cured nerve damage, cancer, paralysis, even blindness. The Catholic
Church recognizes that many of these hundreds of claims have been delusions,
but has certified 69 of them as genuine. We all know, however, about the
placebo effect: almost anything can make you feel better, or even feel cured,
it you sincerely believe it to be so. The placebo effect has long been the bane
of pharmaceutical development. But the placebo effect works so well, especially
if the placebos are expensive, that some scientists wonder if possibly the
placebos should be used to unleash the body’s self-healing capacity. Numerous
scientific studies have been conducted with the water from this spring, and no
curative effects have been found.
The people who make pilgrimages to Lourdes (the second
largest tourist spot in France after Paris) are not lunatics, but they are
experiencing an illusion. The human mind, even a normal mind, sees what it
expects to see.
Second, consider the “miracle of Fátima.” Based on
persistent rumors, somewhere between thirty and one hundred thousand pious
Catholics had gathered near this Portuguese town, fully convinced that some
unspecified solar miracle was going to happen on October 13, 1917. They would
latch onto anything out of the ordinary as a miracle. The people were watching
the sun, many of them having smudged smoke onto glass to make solar filters.
Some reported seeing the sun itself become a spinning disc in the sky, which
careened toward the Earth and then zigzagged back to its original location.
Others reported seeing multi-colored sunlight. Others saw both. Some saw
nothing.
Since the sun is so big and so far away, this event could
not possibly have happened any more than actual stars could fall from the sky
the way the Bible says. So what did happen? The spinning and zigzagging could
have been retinal after-images. Haven’t you ever seen these after glancing at
the sun? Happens to me all the time, if I happen to look toward the sun and
then away. What about the colors? Sometimes high-altitude atmospheric ice
crystals can refract light into a rainbow of colors, even forming colorful
bright blotches to either side of the sun. They may immediately precede a
snowstorm. They are called false suns or sundogs.
They can cause the appearance of three suns, such as in the Wilhelm Müller poem
(Die Nebensonnen) that Schubert used
in Die Winterreise: “Drei Sonnen sah ich
am Himmel steh’n…” I have seen them. If I had not studied the rudiments of
physics, I might have considered them a miracle.
Jesus’ disciples might have wanted so badly to believe
that Jesus was not really dead that their otherwise sane and normal minds
played tricks on them. Christian apologists claim it could not have been an
illusion because the disciples were not expecting to see Jesus rise from the
dead. But it cannot be denied that they hoped He would. In one account, two
disciples walked with a stranger, whom they did not recognize, upon the Emmaus
Road. Only after he was gone did they “realize” that the stranger was in fact
Jesus, but with a different face. This is exactly what a psychologist would
expect to hear from someone who was experiencing an illusion.
The disciples weren’t crazy. They were just human.
Liar and lunatic are not the only alternative to Lord.
There are two alternatives: Lord and Lourdes.
