group visions Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

A Final Word (I Think!) on Group Visions

I am getting some push-back on my discussions of visions. One of the most informed and hard-hitting critiques was this. I certainly agree that it is within your scope of expertise as a New Testament scholar to use the term "vision" to describe the beliefs of people in Antiquity who used this term to describe certain religious experiences. It is within your scope of expertise to define this term as defined by those ancients. However, with all due respect, as a physician I must point out that it is not within your scope of expertise to use this term to determine what was going on physiologically or psychologically during these experiences. This determination belongs to experts in the field of medicine and psychiatry. That is why I believe you should stop using the terms "veridical vision" and "non-veridical". Medical experts and psychiatrists/psychologists believe that these ancients experienced one of three things in these "vision" experiences: a dream (a nightdream or a daydream), an illusion, or an hallucination. That's it. There are no other options. For [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:31:25-04:00March 17th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

What Really Happens With Group Visions

Several people on the blog have pushed back on my claim that group hallucinations (what I’ve called non-veridical visions) can occur. Psychologically, is that really possible? How is it actually possible that a group of, say, twelve people could have the same mental breakdown leading them to see exactly the same thing at the same time? First, some people have objected to my term “vision” since psychologists don’t use that term. They talk instead about “hallucinations.” OK, I’ll concede the point. Religious studies scholars, though, use the term visions, since visionary experiences are very much a part of what it is scholars of religion study (visionaries are stock and trade of the religious studies scholar), and when it comes to the study of the Bible – my own field of expertise – it is common to talk about visions of heaven, or visions of God, or … visions of Jesus after his death. No one talks about the hallucinations of Jesus, since that prejudices the issue of whether Jesus really appeared to people or if [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-29T16:36:52-04:00March 16th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Are Group Visions Possible?

I have received a number of interesting responses to my claim in yesterday’s post that it is possible for groups of people to have the same non-veridical vision (that is, hallucinations). I used the phenomenon of the Blessed Virgin Mary: she seems to appear a good deal, to groups of people – sometimes large groups. In this post I thought I would respond to two of the highly intelligent demurrals. DEMURRAL: As a former evangelical Protestant we believed that Roman Catholics who claim to see the Virgin Mary as a group are in a state of emotional hysteria and seeing an illusion not experiencing a group hallucination. An illusion is a distorted perception of something that really is present, such seeing a stain on a wall or a cloud formation in a photograph and seeing the Virgin Mary or Jesus in it. Many thousands of Roman Catholics claimed to have experienced a visitation of the Virgin Mary in Fatima Portugal not due to seeing and hearing a woman in flowing robes speak the same [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:31:41-04:00March 13th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Group Visions and Agnostic Jesus Scholars: Mailbag March 12, 2017

I will be dealing with two interesting questions on this week’s Readers’ Mailbag. The first has to do with whether hallucinations can explain why Jesus’ followers thought he had been raised from the dead; the second involves with me personally: if I no longer believe in Jesus, why do I keep studying, writing, and teaching about him? To make sense of the first question I need to provide some background. In my book How Jesus Became God I argue that the followers of Jesus believed he was raised from the dead for one and only one reason, that some of them (I don’t think we know how many) had visions of him after his death, and they concluded that he must have been raised from the dead (I argue that the “empty tomb” did not lead anyone to believe; either did anything else). In my book I stress that this explanation works for everyone, whether a Christian believer or not. Christians would say that the disciples claimed to see Jesus after his death because he [...]

BDEhrman2017-09-22T13:20:08-04:00March 12th, 2017|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Visions of Mary

I wrote chapter five of How Jesus Became God today; there will be nine chapters altogether. In this one I am talking about the visions of Jesus that the disciples had. I think they really had visions. Whether that's because Jesus really appeared to them or because they were hallucinating is the difference between believers and unbelievers, and as a historian, I don't feel particularly inclined to judge one way or the other. As a non-believer, of course, I, well, don't believe it. In any event, I think it's important to put visions of Jesus in the context of other kinds of visions, and here I have a short section on visions claimed (and documented) for the Blessed Virgin Mary. *********************************************************************************************************************** Also of relevance to our reflections is that visions of revered religious figures from the past are one of the best documented kind of visionary experience. Here I can speak just briefly about the “appearances” of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and visions in the modern world of Jesus himself. The Blessed Virgin Mary René [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:41:07-04:00March 27th, 2013|Book Discussions|

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Bart D. Ehrman
James A. Gray
Distinguished Professor
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill
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