Did first century Jews believe in ghosts?

I recently saw a discussion/debate between Bart Ehrman and Justin Bass on YouTube. During the discussion, Ehrman made an interesting argument. He believes that Peter, Paul, James (the Lord's brother), and Mary Magdeline all saw something they took to be the risen Jesus. His explanation for why they interpreted it as the risen Jesus was because first century Jews didn't believe in ghosts, so any seeing of Jesus would've been interpreted as a bodily resurrected Jesus.

If Bart's argument is sound, it would undermine an argument I've been making for a long time. My argument is that grief hallucinations and things like that never lead to belief in resurrections, and given the emphasis in some of the Biblical accounts on the physicality of Jesus (e.g. touching him and him eating), it makes more sense to say their experience was different than a mere hallucination. They must've touched him and/or witnessed him eating or something that would cause them to think he had really risen from the dead because otherwise, they would've interpreted it as just a halluciation, vision, ghost, mistaken identity, dream, Jesus didn't die, etc. There were lots of other ways they'd be more likely to interpret what they saw if it were just a hallucination. Resurrection is the very last thing anybody would think if they saw somebody who appeared to be alive but who they knew had died. The fact that they came to that conclusion probably means they had some real convincing physical interaction with Jesus, just as the New Testament reports they did.

Given the way I've argued for Jesus' resurrection in the past, I found Bart's argument really interesting. But I have two problems with it. First, I don't think Bart is right that first century Jews didn't believe in ghosts. There are a few things that came to mind. First, I remember N.T. Wright going into some detail in his book on Jesus' resurrection about ancient beliefs about the afterlife, and although it's been a long time, I vaguely remember him saying first century Jews did believe in ghosts. My copy of his book is in storage right now, so I can't look it up to be sure.

Second, there are at least a couple of times in the New Testament when it says the disciples thought they were seeing or hearing a ghost. The first time was in Luke 24 when the disciples saw Jesus and thought at first that he was a ghost. The second time was in Acts 12 when Peter escaped from prison and knocked on the door where the disciples were hanging out. They assumed Peter had been killed, and it must be his ghost. Bart could answer that by saying Luke wasn't a Jew, and this represents a later belief of gentile Christians, not Jews. On the other hand, when Jesus walked on water, Mark 6 and Matthew 14 both say the disciples thought they were seeing a ghost at first. Mark's gospel certainly wasn't written by a gentile, and Matthew's probalby wasn't either.

Third, there's that passage in 1 Samuel 28 when Saul has the witch of Endor raise Samuel's ghost. It may have been unusual, but surely any Jew familiar with the story would believe there can be ghosts.

Fourth, Bart may be talking about the official Jewish beliefs held by professional Jewish teachers, not the popular beliefs of every day Jews. Sadduccees probably didn't believe in ghosts, but they didn't believe in resurrections either. I don't know about Pharisees. But considering how there were Jews living all over the Roman empire, and not just in Judea, and the fact that Greeks and most other cultures believed in ghosts, it seems very likely to me that ordinary Jews probably believed in ghosts. At least some of them did.

Fifth, a quick google search found multiple web pages claiming that ancient Jews did believe in ghosts.

Sixth, it at least appears in a few passages written by Paul (like 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14) that Paul believed in ghosts or at least a disembodied existence between death and resurrection. Since Paul was a well-educated first century Jew, that surely counts for something.

I will have to look into this subject a little more, but I strongly suspect Bart was just wrong to say first century Jews didn't believe in ghosts. I guess a seventh point might be that if someboddy saw a person they knew to be dead, that very experience could cause them to believe in ghosts even if they didn't believe in ghosts up to then.

The second problem I have with Bart's argument is that even if Bart is right that first century Jews didn't believe in ghosts, we still have to face the fact that grief hallucinations are fairly common, yet they never lead to belief that somebody has risen from the dead. If, as Bart says, the only way the disciples could have interpreted their experience was that Jesus had risen from the dead, and also, as Bart said, hallucinations of dead loved ones is fairly common, then we should expect first century Jews to believe people rose from the dead all the time. Yet that is not what we find. We find, instead, that they believed in a final general resurrection on the last day. So my original point would still stand even if Bart were right about Jews not believing in ghosts. There would still have to be something that was different in the case of the appearances of Jesus that would lead them to believe he had risen from the dead.

While Bart makes an interesting argument that I will probably look into and think about some more, right now I don't think it's a sound explanation for why Peter, James, Paul, and Mary Magdeline thought Jesus rose from the dead.

Schizophrenia and the problem of the external world

This morning I was thinking about that post I made a couple of days on schizophrenia and prophecy. There, I was talking specifically about how you might be able to tell whether some experience you had was a hallucination or not. It seems easier to rule visions, prophecies, etc. out than to rule them in. This morning, I was thinking about the problem more generally.

A person with schizophrenia might have all kinds of delusions and hallucinations. They're not limited to spiritual things. How might a person with schizophrenia tell whether they are seeing something that's really there or not? I'm not a psychiatrist or anything, but having read a lot about psychosis and schizophrenia, including testimonies from people who have it, I get the impression that for them, the hallucinations seem every bit as real as what the rest of us see on a daily basis. How do we know any of it is real? Maybe we all have schizophrenia, and none of this is real.

The problem of the external world comes from the fact that while it seems like we are more than reasonable in thinking that what our senses are telling us about what appears to be a world that exists outside of our minds is basically accurate, there's no way to prove it. It could all just be perception in our minds. I remember putting this problem to somebody one time, and him telling me, "Well, if I see a goat, and you tell me you see it, too, then I know there's a goat out there." But how does he know I'm out there? He's assuming the very thing that's under dispute. He only knows I'm out there telling him about the goat because he already trusts his sensory perception of me.

I've wrestled with that problem a lot and have come down on the side of weak foundationalism. There are just some items of knowledge that are built in. We don't infer them from anything else. They are a priori. We should assume things are basically like they appear to be unless we have really good reason to think otherwise. I've written about this in a few places.

Working Out an Epistemology
Knowledge By Sensory Perception
It's always more reasonable to affirm the obvious than to deny the obvious.

This epistemology doesn't depend on our sensory perceptions be infallible. Even the most mentally healthy among us see mirages and illusions from time to time, and we have dreams that at least seem real while we're having them. Our senses can and do deceive us. My epistemology only depends on our senses being generally reliable.

But it would seem my epistemology could be problematic for somebody with schizophrenia. If they saw an elephant floating in the air in front of them all of a sudden, that elephant may seem every bit as real as the tree just off to the left that's really there. If they apply my thumb rule, they will assume the elephant is real until they have good reason to think otherwise.

If somebody with schizophrenia sees something strange, and the person next to them doesn't see it, that might provide them with good reason to think it's not really there. But then how can they be sure the person next to them is really there? Does this undermine my whole epistemology, or do we just have to make an exception in the case of people with schizophrenia? Can people with schizophrenia have a justified belief in what their senses are telling them? Does epistemology work differently for them?

This seems even more problematic when it comes to the subject of visions. According to the Bible, some people really do see visions that are inspired by God. It is likely that had anybody been with Daniel or Ezekiel when they had their visions, nobody else would've seen what they saw. Should they have concluded it was a hallucination if the person with them couldn't verify it? Or should they continue to affirm what seems obvious to them until an even better reason comes along that disconfirms it, like I talked about in my last post? If they are justified in believing the visions even if nobody else saw them, then are people with schizophrenia justified in believing their hallucinations until something comes along to disconfirm it?

I'm enclined to think a person with schizophrenia who doesn't know they have schizophrenia is justified in believing their hallucinations. It is possible to be justified in believing something that is false. But it also seems to me there are lots of ways a person with schizophrenia can discover that what they are seeing isn't real.

Plantinga has this thought experiment in which you see what appears to be a dog in a field, so you conclude it's a dog. But then you find out there's a pill that can make you think you're seeing a dog every time you look at a sheep. Moreover, you know you just took that pill, and your host just told you there's a sheep in the field. That would destroy any warrant for trusting your senses about what appears to be a dog. Well, finding out you have schizophrenia could be just like that scenario. You've discovered that your belief-producing cognitive faulties aren't working right, so you have reason to doubt them. But without that information, it seems to me you would've been justified in believing it was a dog you were seeing. In the same way, I think a person suffering from psychosis can be justified in believing what they are seeing if they don't know they have psychosis.

There are lots of good reasons a person with psychosis might have to doubt what they are seeing. They might doubt it because (1) the person with them doesn't see it, (2) it's very strange or unusual, or (3) they know they have psychosis. Unless I have psychosis and just don't know it yet, I don't know what it's like. While some of them say their hallucinations seem just as real as everything else, it makes me wonder how they can ever be sure of anything. But presumably they are. A lot of them are functioning okay by using their sensory perceptions. They're just seeing a lot of extra stuff. Some of them learn to distinguish between the real and the hallucination. It would be interesting to meet a weak foundationalist who knew they had schizophrenia to see what they would say about all these things.

Are prophets just people with schizophrenia?

Prophets are people who receive communication from God and relay it to other people. That's the most general definition I can give. In the Bible, prophets recieve these communications in different ways. They might hear an audible voice from God, see a vision, have a dream, or are just given some insight that they couldn't have otherwise known. Sometimes we aren't told how they acquired the information. The prophecies may concern the future, or it may concern the present. It can contains warnings, commands, explanations, or any number of things.

There are people in our present day who claim to receive communications from God, the dead, or other spiritual entities. Maybe you are one of those people. How can we know whether these things really come from God or whether they are just hallucinations, delusions, or misinterpreted dreams? How could anybody have ever known that? How do we know that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam aren't all ultimately rooted in false prophets or people with some sort of psychosis, like schizophrenia?

If you're an atheist, no doubt you'll think they are all rooted either in liars or in people with some kind of psychosis. If you're a naturalist, then you wouldn't think any sort of prophecy can take place. It must all be lies, delusions, and hallucinations.

If you're a Christian, then you can take the apologetic route. Historically, Jesus claimed to be sent from God, then rose from the dead, vindicating his claim. Then Jesus becomes a credible source. He endorsed the Old Testament prophets, so we should, too.

But what about those ancient Jews who pre-dated Jesus? How could they have known? The Bible gives two tests. The first test makes a lot of sense. If somebody claims to speak from God, and what they say doesn't happen, then they have spoken presumptuously. This test only applies to prophecies that make falsifiable claims, though. If they predict the future, for example, and things don't happen the way they said, then we know that didn't come from God. But not all prophecies can be checked out in that way.

This first test is a negative test--it can tell you if a prophecy does not come from God, but it can't tell you if a prophecy does come from God. It is possible for a false prophet to make accurate predictions about the future or to give accurate information about the world. This can happen because a person got lucky, or because a person can just see the trajectory of history, or because of some nefarious spiritual entity. So while making false prophecies does disprove that it came from God, making accurate prophecies is not sufficient to prove that a prophecy did come from God.

There's a second test in those cases. The second test is that if in the course of portraying oneself as a prophet, they attempt to lure you away from the one true God of Israel and toward some other god, then that person is also a false prophet. A test like that could be valuable if it has already been established that YHWH is the one true God, but it wouldn't be helpful in telling you which god is the one true God. How could Abraham have known that God was communicating with him? The fact that Sarah got pregnant might be a good sign, but it's not a guarantee.

There's a third way to test prophets in the Old Testament, and it involves signs and wonders. Moses parted the sea, and Elijah caused fire to come down from the sky. Only a mass hallucination could've faked those events.

I don't think people have changed all that much, physically and mentally, over the last three thousand years. I suspect that just as a certain fraction of the population today suffers from schizophrenia, the same was probably true in the past. So there likely were people in the past who had hallucinations, dreams, visions, and all sorts of things that they interpreted as being messages from God. They didn't have medication for it either. How might they have known (or their family and friends have known) whether they were mentally ill or were really receiving divine communication?

We have a couple of advantages today that they didn't have. First, we know more about mental illnesses today than they did then. Second, we have medication that can treat psychosis. Both of these can provide us with further tests.

If you or somebody you know experiences what appears to be visions, audible voices, impressions, or anything of a spiritual nature or that might have a supernatural source, one way to test that is to see whether medication makes any difference. For example, some Christians claim that demons are harrassing them. If you take medication for psychosis, this shouldn't do anything to prevent a demon from engaging in the same behavior. So if it really is a demon, then you shouldn't expect medication to make a difference. But if the medication does make a difference, then it probably wasn't demons. It was all in your head. The same is true for voices, visions, or anything.

People who suffer from schizophrenia often have multiple symptoms besides just hallucinations. People with schizophrenia often suffer depression and anxiety, have a tendency to withdraw from social interaction, are sometimes paranoid, irritable, and have a hard time getting along with others. If your exeriences are accompanied by all the other symptoms of schizophrenia, then it's more likely to be psychosis than real spiritual activity.

Concerning that last test, this is something ancient people would've noticed as well. One doesn't have to be a trained psychologist to recognize when somebody might have mental problems. So it may be than ancient people could distinguish between somebody in their right mind who claimed to have supernatural visions or receive messages, and somebody who wasn't in their right mind making the same claims.

There's always going to be some people who seem to be mentally healthy, still claim to receive prophecies or have other spiritual experiences, but who are either lying or delusional. If they don't make claims about the future, or reveal hidden things that can be checked out, or urge you to follow other gods, it can be hard to know what to make of it. If you're a cessationist, then you can dismiss it, but what if you're a non-cessationist?

In most cases, you can just ignore it. You don't need to know whether it's from God or not. The Bible is sufficient for theology, wisdom, and moral living. While some overt word from God might be useful to us, it isn't necessary to lead a full Christian life. So if somebody claims to be a prophet or to have a word from God on something, you don't need to stress out about whether it's from God or not. If you have no way to verify whether it's from God or not, you can take the advice on its own merits. If it's good advice, then do it. If it's bad advice, then don't do it. Most of these messages from God I hear from other Christians sound like something out of a fortune cookie. It's possible it's from God, but it doesn't really matter because it doesn't affect the decisions I make. In general, I tend to be skeptical. If God wants to get a message through to me, I think he will, so I don't wring my hands over whether somebody else's message from God really is from God or not even though I'm a non-cessationist.

Is abortion the same thing as or morally equivalent to murder?

Sometimes when the subject of abortion comes up, the subject turns to punishment. If abortion were illegal, what punishment would be appropriate for somebody who had an abortion? While pro-lifers agree that abortion is wrong and ought to be illegal under most circumstances, they differ on the subject of punishment. Some think only the doctor should be prosecuted, and the mother shouldn't be punished at all. Some think the mother ought to be treated just a severely as if she drown her toddler in a bathtub. There are various opinions betweeen these two extremes.

These differing opinions are understandable. As a pro-lifer, it seems perfectly clear to me that the unborn are just as human as the rest of us, and that their lives are just as valuable as the rest of us. That makes abortion gravely immoral. But just as there are varying kinds of homocide with varying degrees of severity, I think the same thing applies to abortion. I wouldn't consider it straight up first degree murder, though many pro-lifers would. But thinking it through isn't as easy as answering the question of the humanity of the unborn.

While we pro-lifers generally agree that the right to life trumps the right to bodily sovereignty, I don't think we should dismiss bodily sovereignty as if it carried no weight at all. I can't think of the legal name for it, but I think abortion should be considered a homocide with mitigating circumstances. When a woman takes the life of her unborn (or when she hires a hit man doctor to do it) she is, in a sense, excercising her bodily sovereignty. Since I do think we have a prima facie right to bodily sovereinty, I think a homocide that takes place in a womb is less heinous than a homocide that takes place outside the womb. I do kind of agree that the doctor who performs the abortion carries more guilt than the mother since the one they are killing isn't in their own womb.

There are two ideas that vie with one another when it comes to a mother taking the life of her unborn (or any of her children). On the one hand, mothers have obligations to their young that they don't have to other people's young. It would seem that the more dependent one's offspring are on you, the more of an obligation you have to care for them. The older they get, the more independent they become, and the less responsible you are for them. They are at their most dependent when they are in the womb. So it would seem that's the time when a mother ought to be the most protective. And thank goodness God placed them in the confines of a protective womb so a mother doesn't have to worry about losing them in a crowd. But doesn't that mean that taking its life at that stage is the absolute worst thing a mother can do--to actively kill their own offspring when it needed them the most?

On the other hand, many of us had mothers who at one time or another would say, "I brought you into this world; I'll take you out"? It's a joke, but it's funny because there's almost a grain of truth in it. You would think that if anybody had a right to take somebody's life it would be their own parents. We Christians think God has the right to take life because he created it. We don't grant humans that same right for the same reason, but procreation is the next best thing to God's creating us. So it would seem that if God has the right to take life on the basis that he made it that parents would have similar rights, though not to the same degree. We do, after all, grant parents the right to punish their children, confine them to their bedroom, make important decisions on their behalf, and to basically rule their lives. And it would seem this right goes away as the child grows older and less dependent, which means the right is strongest when the child is most dependent, which happens in the womb. That's the only time in the child's life when it absolutely belongs to the mother in the most intimate way possible. If there were a time in somebody's life when their mother had the right to take them out, you'd think it would be in the womb since that's the point at which is most "belongs" to the mother.

What's interesting to me is that these two trains of thought lead to opposite conclusions. If you follow my train of thought on the one hand, it leads to the conclusion that homocide is the most heinous when it happens in the womb, but if you follow my train of thought on the other hand, it leads to the conclusion that homocide is the least heinous when it happens in the womb.

There are different degrees of dependency, too. The dependency of the womb is different than the dependency when breast feeding, which in turn is different than when not breast feeding but still living at home. Imagine if humans were marsupials. You could put a different degree of dependency in there. There'd be the womb, then the pouch, then the breast, then the house, then maybe financial dependence while at college, and finally off into the world. In the past, whenever pro-choicers have brought up the famous violinist analogy, I've responded by bringing up the breast feeding analogy. I think the marsupial analogy would be even more interesting because a pouch is less "inside" than a womb, but more "inside" than mere breast feeding. It's a deeper degree of dependence. It would be intersting to take a poll among pro-choicers to ask whether they think "abortion" would be permissible in the pouch stage on the basis of bodily sovereignty.

My own view is that life is equally valuable regardless of its degree of dependence, location, stage of development, etc. However, since a mother does have some rights over her own body, that has to be weighed against the unborn's right to life, and while I think abortion is very wrong, it's not as wrong as killing somebody outside the womb. So the punishment for abortion shouldn't be as severe as the punishment for killing somebody outside the womb. I don't know how severe exactly the punishment should be, though. But it certainly shouldn't be anything like the death penalty or life in prison.

I think pro-lifers ought to strive to be consistent in their rhetoric. I often hear pro-lifers say, "Abortion is murder," but when it comes to the subject of punishment, they rarely ever want to treat the mother as a murderer. Of course it's consistent if you want to pin the murder on the doctor instead, but then why not be willing to convict the mother for a murder-for-hire plot? Of course there are different kinds of homocide--there's first degree murder, second degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, etc. Legal codes have all sorts of ways of differentiating between different kinds of homocide. They aren't all treated the same. I think if pro-lifers want to be consistent, they ought to strive to lable abortion in a way that's consistent with how they think it ought to be prosecuted. Don't call it murder if you don't think it ought to be prosecuted as murder.

My Easter resurrection post - 2023

For the last three years, I've posted something about the resurrection each Easter. I didn't want to break the stride, but I almost didn't make it today because I'm traveling. I know, I know, I could've written it sooner and just not posted it until today, but I've been crazy busy the last two weeks. Anywho, without further ado, here is this year's Easter resurrection post.

So, I was thinking about Mike Licona's argument for the resurrection the other day. His approach is called "inference to the best explanation," which is a way of reasoning inductively. There are certain common sense criteria that make some historical hypotheses better than other hypotheses. An historical hypothesis is an attempt to explain a`set of data by attempting to say what really happened. Which hypothesis does the best at explaining the data, and how do we decide "what is best"?

The data isn't important to the point I want to make today, so I'm not going to defend it, but in Licona's case, it includes things like the death of Jesus, the fact that the disciples initially lost hope, the empty tomb of Jesus, the appearances of Jesus, the restoration of the disciples' hope as a result of seeing Jesus alive, and the conversion of James and Paul. There's more details involved, but those are the main points. What we're trying to explain is what actually happened, and there are various possibilities.

1. Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to the disciples.
2. Jesus didn't really die, but everybody thought he did, so when they saw him, they thought he rose from the dead.
3. The disciples had experiences like grief hallucinations, visions, dreams, or even mistaken identity.
4. The disciples experienced cognitive dissonance and cooked up the resurrection to cope with it.
5. The disciples were just lying to keep the movement alive or something.
6. The resurrection of Jesus wasn't even part of earliest Christianity and developed as a legend later on.
7. The disciples or somebody stole the body, and maybe Peter had a grief hallucination, convinced the others that he had seen Jesus, and they claimed to see Jesus as well (whether they did or not doesn't matter that much in this hypothesis).

There are some others. I'm writing this off the top of my head. Again, these hypotheses aren't important to the main point of my post. I'm just trying to say that there are multiple rival hypotheses we are comparing to the resurrection hypothesis. Now let's get to the point of my post. To determine what hypothesis is the best, we try to see which one does the best when applying certain common sense criteria. Here are a few of them (again off the top of my head).

a. You want a hypothesis to be simple and not ad hoc. That means you don't have to make up a lot of stuff to fill the gaps or have multiple hypothesis to explain all the pieces of the puzzle individually. You just want something parsimonious.
b. You want a hypothesis that does a really good job of making sense of the data. This is called explanatory power.
c. You want a hypothesis that explains as much of the data as possible. A hypothesis that explains all of it is better than one that explains some of it.

And there are two others I can't think of. While I was thinking about Licona's argument the other day, I thought of what I would say if I were trying to argue against the resurrection. I would just add another criteria and say, "The best explanation is the least miraculous." The reason I say that is because if the resurrection was not a miracle, I don't think there would be serious doubt about whether it happened. I think the evidence for the resurrection is every bit as solid as the evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus. Many scholars have said the fact that Jesus was cruified is among if not the most certain thing we can know about him. I think the evidence for the resurrection is almost if not just as solid. I think the only real reason people doubt it is because it's a miracle.

People who try to refute the argument for the resurrection will sometimes dispute the alleged facts, like whether the tomb was really empty, or whether the apostles really saw anything, or whether Jesus really ate in front of them, and things like that. But if these facts did not lead to the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead, people probably wouldn't doubt them. The only thing that's really problematic about the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead is that it's a miracle.

I think that's where the real argument ought to lie. That's where most of the time should be spent.

In general, I think we should prefer non-miraculous claims to miraculous claims, all other things being equal. The question, then, is whether all other things are equal. It's also important to address the question of how much we should prefer non-miraculous hypotheses to miraculous ones. If you absolutely think miracles are impossible, then this one criteria may be sufficient to trump all the others because if miracles are impossible, then any far fetched theory is more likely than a resurrection. But if you subscribe to a worldview in which the miracles are either possible or are even known to happen from time to time, then that one criteria may not carry as much wait as it would for a naturalist. There are some Christian apologists who want to put miraculous claims and hypotheses on the same footing as non-miraculous claims and hypotheses, and I think that's just crazy. You don't have to be a naturalist to have a general suspicion when it comes to fantastic claims. We do that even when the claims are not miraculous, like if I were to tell you Kate Beckinsale kissed me at the grocery store today. You'd be suspicious because it just seems, on the face of it, to be unlikely. Well, the same thing applies to the miraculous.

I do subscribe to a worldview in which miracles are possible, so although I have suspicions when it comes to miraculous claims, I don't rule them out altogether. In the case of the resurrection of Jesus, the evidence is sufficient to overcome my suspicion toward miraculous claims in general.

Therefore, happy Easter. Jesus rose from the dead. He is the messiah. He did die for sins. He conquered death. He atoned for sins. He will raise us in the last days.

Easter post from 2022
Easter post from 2021
Easter post from 2020.
A post that's relevant to this one because it talks about the oft-repeated slogan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"