Last week, we looked in detail at the scientific implausibility of group hallucinations. That is, since hallucinations are personal mental events, groups of people can’t hallucinate the same thing in the same place at the same time. The significance of this is that half of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus are to groups of people (cf 1 Cor 15:5-8). But what about the appearances of the risen Jesus to individuals? After all, individuals certainly could have hallucinated Jesus, right? In fact, in Paul’s list (1 Cor 15:5-8), Jesus first appears to the individual Cephas, or Peter. Now, regarding Peter, on the surface, we do have some reason to believe that he may have suffered a hallucination.
Having denied Jesus three times (Luke 22:6162), it has been postulated that Peter could have hallucinated Jesus “as an unconscious resolution to his cognitive dissonance,” what psychologists generally term as bereavement hallucinations or as “grief hallucinations.” Most often, these are hallucinations of a recently departed loved one. It is postulated that Peter’s bereavement vision of Jesus could have been triggered by delusional “wishful thinking” and unsuccessful mourning in an attempt to gain some relief from his guilt. This seems plausible. There is certainly no doubt that Peter was stricken with heavy grief, and he was guiltridden for having denied Jesus three times in his time of need. However, there is a self-identifiable quality to grief hallucinations. Research shows that those experiencing bereavement hallucinations know that their visions are hallucinations and are not real. As such, even under duress, Peter would have known that his vision of Jesus possessed a particular quality that would allow him to identify his hallucination as unreal.
