A Failed Criticism of William Lane Craig's Opposition to the Hallucination Hypothesis

In an e-mail exchange with a Christian, I was asked to give my opinion about a blog entry by an ex-apologist who goes by the name of Exapologist entitled William Lane Craig on the Origin of the Belief in Jesus' Resurrection. Exapologist claims to have found a flaw in William Lane Craig's argument counter to the idea that the resurrection appearances weren't hallucinations.

According to Exapologist, Craig's argument can be put into the following syllogism which, subject to a correction of the context of Dr. Craig's argument I make below, I will accept as accurate for purposes of this post:

1. If belief in Jesus' resurrection was due to something other than experiences as of Jesus risen from the dead, then the belief was derived from either Christian influences or Jewish influences.
2. If it was derived from Christian influences, then Christianity existed prior to itself.
3. Christianity didn't exist prior to itself.
4. Therefore, it wasn't derived from Christian influences. (From 2 and 3)
5. If it was derived from Jewish influences, then the idea of a single individual rising from the dead before the end of time was extant in Jewish belief prior to Christianity.
6. The idea of a single individual rising from the dead before the end of time was not extant in Jewish belief prior to Christianity.
7. Therefore, it wasn't derived from Jewish sources. (From 5 and 6)
8. Therefore, the belief wasn't derived from either Christian influences or Jewish influences (From 4 and 7)
9. Therefore, belief in Jesus resurrection was not due to something other than experiences as of Jesus risen from the dead (From 1 and 8)

Exapologist believes that the argument is flawed at paragraph 5. Exapologist writes:

For as a number of NT critics have pointed out, and as is fairly clear from the writings of the NT itself, the earliest Christians believed that Jesus' putative resurrection was (to use Paul's terminology) the "first fruits" of the general resurrection of the dead at the end of time. This is an agricultural metaphor. When farmers reaped and ate the first fruits of the harvest, they would then reap the full harvest the very next day -- the "general" harvest was "imminent", as it was "inaugurated" with the reaping of the first-fruits. Similarly, the earliest Christians believed that the final judgement and the general resurrection were imminent, given their belief that Jesus' resurrection was itself the inaugurating event of the general resurrection and the end of all things. Thus, contrary to what Craig says on this matter, there is a continuity between the beliefs of the early Christians and the beliefs of many Jews of his time: Jesus' resurrection was fundamentally construed in these eschatological terms.[1] And of course, as Craig acknowledges, the idea of a general resurrection at the end of time was a common Jewish belief at the time. Thus, premise (5) is false, and the argument is unsound.

Although I know that skeptics seem to hate it when I do this, let's put the argument in context. This argument is made after Craig has made strong arguments in support of the belief that Jesus actually died on the cross during the crucifixion, that he was laid in a tomb that was known, that the tomb was empty, and that the disciples claim to have seen Him "on the third day" and thereafter. The idea that Jesus' appearance was the result of hallucinations by the disciples is the attempt to explain what most Biblical scholars (even those who have no faith in the accuracy of the New Testament texts) acknowledge was an honest belief by the apostles that they had seen something and thought it was Jesus risen from the dead. Even in the atrocious "In Search of Jesus" with Peter Jennings that was on television a few years ago, all of the scholars interviewed acknowledged that the disciples had seen something that led them to believe that Jesus had risen. This is a point that is pretty much beyond dispute.

Now, the question for the skeptics is how to account for the post-crucifixion appearances of Jesus in light of the evidence of the death of Jesus, His burial in a known tomb, and the empty tomb itself. One theory that is presented -- a fairly weak theory, I might add -- is that the appearances were hallucinations. Consider the following from Dr. Ben Witherington, III's essay He Is Risen Indeed:

The suggestion that the disciples were victims of a hallucination, or their experience was the ultimate example of wish projections, or they merely saw visions has several problems. First, on all accounts the disciples doubted, deserted, and denied Jesus at the end, with the possible exception of some of his female followers and perhaps the Beloved Disciple (a Judean disciple). They were hardly in a psychological condition to produce a fantasy about a risen Jesus. Their hopes had been utterly shattered by his crucifixion less than three days before. Second, it will not do to suggest a mass hallucination, because all the traditions we have suggest that Jesus appeared at different times and places to different persons, last of all to Paul. I know of no basis for the notion of a contagious hallucination. Third, it is hardly believable that the earliest Christians would have made up the notion that Jesus appeared first to some women. We find no extended discussion in the Gospels of a personal appearance first to Peter or to James the brother of the Lord, but we do have stories about the appearance or appearances to the leading female disciples. Given the patriarchal world of the earliest Christians, it is not believable that a missionary-minded group would make up such a story. Nor is there any basis for the suggestion that these appearance stories were largely generated out of the Old Testament, which hardly mentions the notion of resurrection from the dead. In other words, the evidence as we have it strongly resists attempts to redefine "resurrection," if, that is, we wish to preserve any continuity with the historical Christian witness on this matter.

Another excellent source for understanding the weakness of the hallucination hypothesis is Dr. Gary R. Habermas' essay Explaining Away Jesus’ Resurrection: HALLUCINATION; The Recent Revival of THEORIES. Dr. Habermas points out multiple problems with the hallucination hypothesis demonstrating that for the post-crucifixion appearances to be hallucinations they must overcome a number of very difficult objections. Moreover, the hallucination theory has a very minimal explanatory scope when viewing the entirety of the evidence. In other words, the hallucination hypothesis could possibly explain the appearances, but does nothing to explain other issues related to the resurrection, e.g., the empty tomb.

Exapologist tries to make the claim that Jesus' resurrection was expected by the apostles which would explain how they would be primed for a post-crucifixion experience. To support this idea, Exapologist points the early Christian view of Jesus as the firstfruits of the resurrection. But, of course, the understanding of Jesus as the firstfruits as expressed in the New Testament (found in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28) is the result of Paul looking back in hindsight and seeing what Jesus had already done. But to be able to look back and see that Jesus had arisen first is quite a different proposition from looking forward prior to the actual resurrection and expecting Jesus to rise from the dead.

There certainly is agreement that the Jewish view was ultimately looking forward to a bodily resurrection. But as William Lane Craig points out in his on-line article Visions of Jesus: A Critical Assessment of Gerd Lüdemann's Hallucination Hypothesis, the Jewish belief was that a bodily resurrection would occur only after the coming of the Father at the end of the world. Here's what Craig says:

Jewish hope in the resurrection of the dead was invariably a corporate and eschatological hope. The resurrection of all the righteous dead would take place after God had brought the world as we know it to an end. Surveying the Jewish literature, Joachim Jeremias concluded,

Ancient Judaism did not know of an anticipated resurrection as an event of history. Nowhere does one find in the literature anything comparable to the resurrection of Jesus. Certainly resurrections of the dead were known, but these always concerned resuscitations, the return to the earthly life. In no place in the later Judaic literature does it concern a resurrection to δ ο ξ α as an event of history.{41}

Even if the disciples' faith in Jesus had somehow managed to survive the crucifixion, they would at most have looked forward to their reunion with him at the final resurrection and would perhaps have preserved his tomb as a shrine, where Jesus's bones might rest until the eschatological resurrection. That was the Jewish hope.

But we know that that did not happen. Despite their having most every predisposition to the contrary, it is an indisputable fact that the earliest disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.

Look back at what Exapologist claims: the firstfruits analogy set forth in the writings of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 is a continuation of Jewish thought. Certainly, I'll agree that it is an extension of Jewish thought (as is all Christianity, ultimately), but it is not an extension that is not readily foreseeable. In fact, it is this absense of a connection between the teachings about the Messiah being resurrected separately prior to the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus (or, at least, the disciples' claims that Jesus had, in fact, been bodily resurrected) that is missing in exapologist's argument. Exapologist sets forth nothing that shows that any significant number of Jews were expecting the Messiah to rise bodily ahead of all of the other people. Instead, he simply acknowledges what Dr. Craig acknowledges in his writings -- that the Jewish teachings expected a bodily resurrection. But Dr. Craig's explanation goes beyond that statment. Dr. Craig's argument emphasis that the Jewish teachings prior to Jesus' resurrection about a bodily resurrection prior to the end of time was just the opposite of what Exapologist suggests in his argument. Craig points out that the Jewish teaching was that no one would arise bodily until the end.

So, in my opinion, Exapologist has a large hole in his analysis -- the failure to show that any Jewish teachers expected the Messiah to rise bodily before the end of the world. Without that teaching being shown, there is nothing to show that the disciples would have expected the bodily resurrection of Jesus by himself as the firstfruits prior to the resurrection itself. Without that connection, Craig's argument stands and premise #5 has not been shown to be false.