JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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being so tall that He towers above the clouds. Several extremely dramatic miracles and
pronouncements are made which demonstrate that "all power in heaven and on earth" has been
given to Jesus. In contrast the accounts in the New Testament are simple and straight-forward.
Subjective Hallucinations or Objective Visions
Some have argued that Jesus' appearances were subjective hallucinations or objective
visions. This is the theory that God gave these to His people, but they were not visions of a
physical being. J. P. Moreland, in his book Scaling the Secular City, gives various reasons why
such a theory is faulty.
The appearances happen to several individuals. Some appearances were to a single
person while another was to a group of 500. That these were mere hallucinations is highly
unlikely since they do not fit in with the Jewish expectations of that time. It was the Jewish
understanding that no one would be raised by himself. Rather there was to be only one
resurrection or translation where everybody was to be raised together or transported, all at once.
According to biblical scholar Wilckens, the Jewish understanding of visions contained two
elements: they were understood as being visions of people directly translated to heaven and not
raised from the dead, and in Jewish tradition, visions were always experienced by individuals
and not by groups.15
Since Jesus appeared to 500 people at once, the implication is that if the reader were
skeptical, he could ask several of these people because they were still alive.
Five hundred people do not hallucinate at once. This is psychologically ridiculous. In
fact, it is highly unlikely that even two or more people would have the same hallucination at the
same time. Also, hallucinations happen to persons who are high-strung, highly imaginative,
anxious, and nervous. Not exactly the characteristics of Jesus' disciples.
Hallucinations do not receive an interpretation which is entirely new. Rather they
combine (possibly in a new way) the beliefs already present in the collective subconscious of the
person having the hallucination. Thus they are linked in an individual's subconscious to his past
beliefs and experiences. If the disciples had hallucinations, they would have interpreted them to
mean that Jesus had been translated, not resurrected, and they would not have come up with the
picture of Jesus' body which is presented in the appearance narratives.16
As James Dunn points out, Jesus' reference to His "coming on clouds of glory" as a
heavenly figure would have stirred the imagination of the disciples and would have provided a
picture to interpret hallucinations they might have had. Yet nothing of this figure appears in the
resurrection narratives.17 Thus James Dunn reasons:
"The oddness and unexpectedness of the first Christian belief that God had raised
Jesus from the dead should not be discounted. A belief that God had vindicated
Jesus or exalted him to heaven after death would have been more understandable.