Abstract The debate between evangelical and skeptical scholars about Jesus’s post-mortem appearances has long been framed as a binary choice: either his followers literally saw a bodily resurrected Jesus (the Resurrection Hypothesis) or they experienced hallucinations and collective delusions (the Hallucination Hypothesis). This article argues that despite their radical disagreement, both positions share the same interpretive framework – scientific realism and representationalist thinking – and consequently offer only opposing answers within an inadequate conceptual structure. Drawing on perspectival realism as an alternative scientific framework, the article reframes the post-mortem appearance reports not as accounts of perceptual sight or pathological hallucination, but as residues of culturally embedded visionary experiences. Insights from neuroanthropology, the phenomenology of bereavement experiences, and cross-cultural research on polyphasic consciousness demonstrate that such visionary experiences are normal human phenomena with neurobiological grounding and intersubjective validity. The article proposes that Jesus’s followers’ conviction of his resurrection arose from visionary encounters shaped by specific cultural, bodily, and circumstantial conditions. Rather than confirming or disconfirming the resurrection event, this perspectival approach complicates the analysis and offers a richer understanding of how resurrection belief emerged among the earliest followers of Jesus from visionary experiences.
Abstract It has become the norm for Christian apologists studying the resurrection of Jesus to argue that the alleged historicity of this event can be made clear via the application of historical methods such as the principles of analogy, antecedent probability, and inference to the best explanation. Bayes’ Theorem, although strictly a statistical tool, has also sometimes been deployed to bolster these arguments. In this article, I argue that each of these methods is ipso facto beyond the possibility of use for historical enquiry in this instance, because the involvement of God as agent prevents it. Despite objections by apologists, I suggest that, assuming there was a resurrection “event” of sorts, the best of the natural explanations, such as the hallucination-cum-collective delusion hypothesis, is as likely to be true as the traditional explanation in historical terms.
Abstract A shortened and revised version of the introduction to the 2026 edition of Manufacturing Religion , this essay demonstrates the continued relevance of the book’s critique, which argued for a more rigorously historical approach to the implications of designating assorted cultural items as religious. Not unlike thirty years ago, when the book was first published, today many seemingly critical scholars often are ambiguous in their approach; for while acknowledging that the word “religion” has a history they nonetheless work as if what it names somehow predates all such designation and thus human agency. This idealist presumption of an enduring and inherently meaningful faith, experience, spirituality, or tradition – or what I refer to as religion before “religion” – is, however, one of the defining marks of the discourse on religion that is examined in the book, making plain that many scholars have by now undermined this critical approach by adopting it only partway.
Abstract This essay argues that comparative microhistory offers a largely neglected but especially productive practice for the historical study of the resurrection of Jesus. After introducing the key features of microhistory and the justifications and objections surrounding comparative approaches, the essay demonstrates the value of the practice through a focused case study. Two early modern English resurrection accounts – those of John Robins and Dorcas Erbury – are used as comparanda to defamiliarise the resurrection narratives and illuminate Matt 28:17, the unresolved doubt of some disciples before the risen Jesus. The comparison generates a range of historically plausible interpretative possibilities and demonstrates the wider utility of comparative microhistory for the study of early Christianity.
Abstract This article argues that the contemporary existential and intellectual problem of divine hiddenness ( Deus absconditus ) must be reframed through the intersecting lenses of trauma theory and the sociocultural conditions of a secular age. Moving beyond the analytical philosophical problem of non-belief and classical apophatic (negative) theology, it posits that the perceived silence of God is most acutely experienced as a hermeneutical rupture within contexts of profound suffering and within a secular “immanent frame.” The article constructs a “trauma-informed apophatic theology.” This model reconceives divine hiddenness not primarily as an epistemological puzzle or a mystical ascent, but as a potential mode of kenotic solidarity – a divine participation in godforsakenness that calls for an ethical, narrative, and communal theological response. This approach seeks to reground theological possibility in a responsibility to the traumatised other and in a humble, reflective practice that holds open the space of silence without premature resolution.
