Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Dale Allison says that bereavement apparitions (sometimes called grief hallucinations) provide useful and enlightening "parallels" to the content of the Gospel stories when they describe Jesus' appearances to the disciples. Grief hallucinations are often a skeptical go-to theory to account for the beginning of Christianity. Allison himself uses these alleged parallels to support his own version of an objective vision theory--Jesus really appeared to the disciples, but in a non-bodily form.
Even if we don't delve deeply into Allison's rather uncritical survey of literature on apparitions, based on his own admissions, are there really significant parallels?
In this series I will show that Allison makes very telling admissions that show that such apparitions (even if they are objectively real) do not constitute a good parallel for the data in the Gospel accounts. Of course, neither Allison nor more skeptical scholars think that the disciples actually experienced what is found in the Gospels. But that is where the bait and switch comes in: Allison sometimes explicitly claims and often strongly implies that the apparition literature provides useful parallels for *what we actually find in the Gospel stories*. Then, when it becomes clear that it doesn't really fit at all well, he switches to dismissing the parts of those stories that don't fit his theory as being made up later.
Today we'll see this dynamic at work concerning Allison's telling admission (which he doesn't recognize as a telling admission) that apparitions often speak *only briefly*.
Dale Allison says that bereavement apparitions (sometimes called grief hallucinations) provide useful and enlightening "parallels" to the content of the Gospel stories when they describe Jesus' appearances to the disciples. Grief hallucinations are often a skeptical go-to theory to account for the beginning of Christianity. Allison himself uses these alleged parallels to support his own version of an objective vision theory--Jesus really appeared to the disciples, but in a non-bodily form.
Even if we don't delve deeply into Allison's rather uncritical survey of literature on apparitions, based on his own admissions, are there really significant parallels?
In this series I will show that Allison makes very telling admissions that show that such apparitions (even if they are objectively real) do not constitute a good parallel for the data in the Gospel accounts. Of course, neither Allison nor more skeptical scholars think that the disciples actually experienced what is found in the Gospels. But that is where the bait and switch comes in: Allison sometimes explicitly claims and often strongly implies that the apparition literature provides useful parallels for *what we actually find in the Gospel stories*. Then, when it becomes clear that it doesn't really fit at all well, he switches to dismissing the parts of those stories that don't fit his theory as being made up later.
Today we'll see this dynamic at work concerning Allison's telling admission (which he doesn't recognize as a telling admission) that apparitions often speak *only briefly*.
