Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Christ, Part 44.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been thinking about the explanation offered by the myth and legend hypothesis of the empty

tomb, the postmortem appearances of Jesus, and the origin of the Christian faith.

And we saw last time that this explanation fails to offer a plausible account of the origin of the disciples' belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead.

Now, I wanted to push the discussion a notch further, however.

Suppose that the disciples were not simply left to themselves after the crucifixion

of Jesus so that the belief in the resurrection would not have any sort of impetus

from either Christian, pagan, or Jewish sources to originate. Suppose instead that someone else stole the body of Jesus

out of the tomb and that the disciples upon finding the tomb empty were so shocked that this

caused them to hallucinate visions of Jesus. Would that have led them to proclaim that God had

raised him from the dead? Now you might object at this point that those hypotheses like

the theft of the body or hallucinatory visions have all sorts of other problems that would

disqualify them.

And I admit the point, but we're being generous here to the skeptic and we're supposing

just for the sake of argument that that's what happened.

Would the disciples have then concluded that God had raised Jesus from the dead?, again, the answer would seem to be no. You see,

hallucinations as projections of the mind cannot contain anything that is not already in the mind.

And therefore, given current Jewish beliefs about the afterlife, the disciples,

if they were to project hallucinations of Jesus, would have had visions of Jesus in heaven,

in paradise, where Jews believed the souls of the righteous dead went until the resurrection at the end

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