Christic Visions and the Resurrection Appearances of Jesus

Abstract

Recently, scholars have shown an increasing interest in comparing the resurrection appearances of Jesus with contemporary accounts of Christic visions, the aim being to show a line of formal continuity between them. Phillip Wiebe avers that neither Jesus’s resurrection appearances nor these contemporary events are explicable on a scientific basis alone, and require a mysterious X-factor in order to justify them fully. I argue that the physicalist stance taken in the later Gospel narratives does not belong to this trajectory, and that the visionary import of the earlier accounts, with which modern Christic visions do have something in common, does not necessarily require the supernaturalist explanation suggested.