The psychology of the resurrection appearances
Many assume, for historical or theological reasons, that it is impossible to accept the empirical reality of the types of experience of the risen Christ reported in the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Those who make this assumption, when asked about the source of the belief in Jesus having been raised from the dead, tend to respond in one of two ways. Some assert a mythic accretion onto an originally somewhat vague concept of the spiritual reality of Jesus' containing life. Others, however, while sharing the same historical or theological doubts, take seriously the need to account for the rapid transformation of Jesus' followers which occurred in the period following his death. The conversion of those followers -from a frightened and defeated group into the core of a confident and death-defying church -can only, they suggest, be accounted for by some visionary experience with psychic roots. For only such an experience, they reason, could, through its numinous intensity or apparent realism, have brought about such a change.
Among those who pursue this explanation there is, however, no general agreement about the nature of the experience which led to the disciples' transformation. Some, believing that the historians' route is the one that can best throw light on the question, have looked to St. Paul as a better clue to the nature of the earliest experiences than the accounts to be found in the gospels. Like Norman Perrin, they believe that 'Paul is the one witness we have whom we can interrogate about his claim to have seen Jesus risen, and our assumption has to be that if we could interrogate the other witnesses their claims would be similar to his'.1 Others, by contrast, have hinted that a better approach might be through an examination of human psychology. One such approach of my own is based on the dreamlike and mythological characteristics of the experiences reported in the biblical accounts. These characteristics, I suggested, if viewed as aspects of visionary experiences, exhibit remarkable parallels with those outlined in C.G. Jung's account of what he calls a visionary rumour. This concept, used by Jung to provide a psychological analysis of modem UFO sightings, is based