Was It Just A Hallucination?

Did the disciples see the risen Jesus? One alternative is they hallucinated.

My personal opinion is that whatever they saw, it was in Galilee, probably in the order recounted in 1 Cor 15, and nothing like the events described in the gospels. We cannot say what they saw, and I am certainly not putting this forward as what happened - I do not think we have enough information to even make a reasonable guess. I am just looking at whether it is plausible.

Grief Vision

It is very common to have a vision of a loved one who has recently passed away. I couple of links here and here.

Note that these are personal visions, so arguably not like the mass sighting seen in Galilee. That said, a grief vision by one disciple, Peter perhaps.

Willful Belief

This paper discusses how people believe what they want to be true. Here is the abstract:

This article investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations, and markets.
Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret
and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is shown to be
contagious when it is harmful to others, and self-limiting when it is beneficial. Similarly, with Kreps–
Porteus preferences, willful blindness (information avoidance) spreads when it increases the risks borne by others....

Clearly it is about finance, but it looks to me like it applies just as much to religion. Why did the early Christians believe Peter? Because they wanted it to be true.

It is certainly something seen in Christians today.

Mass Hysteria

Also called "Mass psychogenic illness", this is where a psychological disorder affects a group of people. For example, see here.


What we have is a group of people desperate to believe Peter really saw Jesus. It seems certainly plausible that they would collectively believe they too had seen Jesus.

Note that we have some records of mass hallucinations from around that time in the works of Plutach, specifically in The Life of Coriolanus, which cites "numerous and credible witnesses" to a statue talking:

The senate commended their public spirit, and erected the temple and its image at the public charge,45 but they none the less contributed money themselves and set up a second image of the goddess, and this, the Romans say, as it was placed in the temple, uttered some such words as these: "Dear to the gods, O women, is your pious gift of me."
...But that articulate speech, and language so clear and abundant and precise, should proceed from a lifeless thing, is altogether impossible; since not even the soul of man, or the Deity, without a body duly organized and fitted with vocal parts, has ever spoken and conversed. 3 But where history forces our assent with numerous and credible witnesses, we must conclude that an experience different from that of sensation arises in the imaginative part of the soul, and persuades men to think it sensation; as, for instance, in sleep, when we think we see and hear, although we neither see nor hear.

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

With regards to Paul's vision of the Road to Damascus, a case has been made that this was cause by  temporal lobe epilepsy. This, I think, is the safest of these claims here.

The account in Acts claims that the men traveling with Paul also heard the voice, but this was written some fifty or so years after the event by someone who was not there and seemingly cannot even name the men involved. No stretch to imagine this was made up to substantiate the story.

 A Note About the 500

There is a theory that the appearance to the 500 was a later addition to 1 Corinthians, and that certainly seems plausible. The main reason for thinking this is that this appearance is not mentioned by any of the gospels. It is especially odd for Luke, given his knowledge of Paul. If the author of Luke really was a travel companion of Paul (and I find that quite reasonable), how did the author never heard about the 500 from Paul?

There is a lengthy discussion about the list here, with the suggestion that is is all a later interpolation.

A Note About "Seeing" Jesus

The Greek word Paul uses for seeing Jesus can actually mean seeing in a vision, according to here. Certainly what Paul saw was a vision; we know that from Acts, whether the cause was temporal lobe epilepsy, so it is certainly possible.