Belief Based on Visionary Experiences

The circle of first followers of Jesus, and at least Paul, believed in the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus because they saw him. In addition to the above-mentioned evidence, there are both Pauls’ own and Luke’s accounts (Acts 9:14 & 22) of his visionary experience. What Luke offers as Paul’s co-called conversion experience on the road to Damascus, can equally well be described in anthropological and neuroscientific terms as ecstatic trance or an altered state of consciousness (Pilch 2004: 25-40). It is clear that for Paul this as well as the

resurrection appearances to the other disciples were not normal events of visual perception but visions or revelations in which God revealed his Son- deduced from the passive verb ofethey used four times in 1 Corinthians 15. In 1 Corinthians 9:1 he affirms that he has orawo Jesus while in Galatians 1:12 he calls his vision a revelation (apocalypsis).

Paul probably was fully convinced about what he saw (as Grindal was) but without the interpretive language of consensual reality and ASCs. But the meaning is not merely in the single words. It is apparent that Paul and the gospel authors talk about the same events by means of distinct styles. In the Gospels the resurrection appearances are presented by means of third person narratives and as witnessed accounts. As indicated above, within polyphasic cultures there is nothing strange about presenting a visionary experience as if it is a witnessed event. Paul, on the other hand, lists or reports about the events (1 Cor 15) and from a neuroanthropological perspective it is obvious that for him and his audience visionary appearances constituted legitimate and sufficient evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.

The narrative accounts in the Gospels of what Paul calls visionary appearances (visions) by Jesus’ followers, contain both direct and indirect evidence about their nature. While certainly not part of the earliest manuscript tradition, the longer ending of Mark (due to text critical considerations) contains summary reports of appearances to three distinct groups- accidentally these are also the people mentioned in the other narrative reports. It is remarkable that the text repeatedly states (Mark 16:9,12,14) that these were appearances or revelations. The first are the visionary experiences of the women. While it is impossible to reconcile the data if these were reports about actual vision events, what remains constant is that some women had visionary encounters of Jesus (John 20:11 and Matt 28:2). In fact, in both cases side by side to having seen Jesus, the women are reported to also have seen angels (or in the Lucan version (Luke 24:4), two men in dazzling apparel. When referring to the women’s experience, Luke explicitly says that they saw ‘a vision of angels’ (24:23). There is no reason to think that seeing Jesus was any different from seeing the angels. And at least the vision of angels is another instance in the NT of narrative account that in a normal way relays about a visionary experience.

Second, it is possible that the Markan reference to the two disciples walking into the country (Mark 16:12) is a reference to the Lucan story about the Emmaus account that is clearly

presented as a visionary encounter. Jesus’s appearance to Cleopas in the Emmaus story also demonstrates remarkable aspects of the seeing because apart from the fact that Jesus suddenly appears, he was not immediately recognised and appeared and disappeared randomly (Luke 24:13-35). According to the Markan (16:2) account, he appeared to them in ‘another form’ – a feature associated with visionary experiences (Pilch 1998: 58, Craffert 2002: 101).

The third group is the appearance to the disciples. In the Gospels three different locations are mentioned for the appearances: Jerusalem (John 20:19-23) somewhere between Jerusalem and Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35) and Galilee (Luke 24: 36-49 par, John 2:1). These engagements with Jesus all contain elements typical of visionary encounters, such as, a lack of immediate recognition of his face or his ability to travel (in the visions) through closed doors or thin air. The Gospels all contain and agree on the fact that Jesus appeared to his first followers while John (21:1) explicitly states that Jesus revealed himself. Matthew (28:16) mentions that it was on a mountain – a setting conducive to visionary experiences. In fact, Matthew’s account of visionary experiences started already at the time of Jesus’ death when a number of saints emerged (in a vision) from their tombs (Matt 27:52-53).

Where visionary experiences give access to consensual reality, the content of the visions are not only as real and true as those obtained from ordinary perception but also true to life. What is experienced in reality constituting visionary events becomes real and true. In visions, like in dreams, people can perform almost any action. Pilch (1998: 57), for example refers to research that ‘the subject having the vision or dream provides the soundtrack for what is being seen. Dream provides the soundtrack for what is being seen.’ And the soundtrack derives from the culture’s latent discourse or lexicon. For these reasons the resurrected Jesus could move through closed doors, and disappear randomly, eat and speak. It is hardly a revolutionary insight to claim that most scholars agree that Jesus’ first followers, including Paul, believed he was resurrected because they saw him or because he was revealed to them (Pilch 2004: 17ff)

The suggestion from a neuroanthropological point of view is that precisely as visions they were reality creating events and for them constituted the basis for the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. As a cultural reality it was subjectively (culturally) constituted but

like all other realities appeared and presented objectlike. Therefore, read from this culturally sensitive point of view a new appreciation for the NT data can be developed that do not take the texts at face value as about the normal seeing of a physical resurrected body. And, as with the Sisala case, these are not accounts of visions (of angels and Jesus) scattered in between accounts of real events or true seeing encounters. The real exegetical challenge remains to analyse Paul’s accounts as well as the Gospel narratives about the appearances as accounts of synesthetic integration or ASCs that constituted reality for them.