Reframing the Debate on the Post-mortem Experiences

Abstract

Abstract The debate between evangelical and skeptical scholars about Jesus’s post-mortem appearances has long been framed as a binary choice: either his followers literally saw a bodily resurrected Jesus (the Resurrection Hypothesis) or they experienced hallucinations and collective delusions (the Hallucination Hypothesis). This article argues that despite their radical disagreement, both positions share the same interpretive framework – scientific realism and representationalist thinking – and consequently offer only opposing answers within an inadequate conceptual structure. Drawing on perspectival realism as an alternative scientific framework, the article reframes the post-mortem appearance reports not as accounts of perceptual sight or pathological hallucination, but as residues of culturally embedded visionary experiences. Insights from neuroanthropology, the phenomenology of bereavement experiences, and cross-cultural research on polyphasic consciousness demonstrate that such visionary experiences are normal human phenomena with neurobiological grounding and intersubjective validity. The article proposes that Jesus’s followers’ conviction of his resurrection arose from visionary encounters shaped by specific cultural, bodily, and circumstantial conditions. Rather than confirming or disconfirming the resurrection event, this perspectival approach complicates the analysis and offers a richer understanding of how resurrection belief emerged among the earliest followers of Jesus from visionary experiences.