It is the "favorite child" of resurrected Jesus apologists!I told you] that [Jesus] appeared to Cephas [Peter]; then to the twelve; then he appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of whom most remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then he appeared to James; then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to one malformed, he appeared to me too, for I am the least of the apostles, who is not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.
Most probable explanation according to Richard Carrier:
But I find that the heaviest argument about this one time mass appearance is that so many people cannot verify a popping up and vanishing again person. Not even if Jesus appeared in the collosseum arena with his 500 fans rounded up around him as audience!
Paul cannot mean Jesus hung around with his followers for days or weeks. Paul’s use of “all at once” for only one single event, and his entire sequence (Cephas, and then each of the Twelve, and then the brethren, and then James, and then each of the Apostles, and then Paul), entails these were isolated, momentary visions. They came, and went. Paul therefore cannot mean a lingering Jesus who stuck around and dined with them for days on end. That simply isn’t what he is describing here. At all. And yet this fact strongly supports explanations from the cognitive science of religious experience: these were visions; not a reanimated body. A reanimated body would stick around.
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The most probable thing that could have happened is that all the brethren in the congregation at that time, riling themselves up into an ecstasy on Pentecost owing to its prophetic and religious significance, and the exciting and hope-fulfilling claims of the Twelve, had a Fatima-style mass experience, in an altered state hallucinating amorphous lights above them, and feeling the Presence of the Lord, and then concluded this was an instance of Jesus having appeared to them, now in his celestial and supernatural form. Probably no auditory element was present, no verbal revelation, not only because none is recorded (not even in Acts), but that would have made this into an apostolic election. And Paul clearly does not think it was. These brethren did not become, and thus are not described as, apostles. The apostles appear in the next verse.
Scientifically, what happened would be like that Fatima scenario: each individual had his own private hallucination of a miraculous light, each one different from the next, but because it was amorphous and only communicable in the abstract (“I see lights above us!”) there was no way to “compare notes” (even if they were inclined to) so as to discover they were seeing different things (and they likely wouldn’t conclude so anyway: most believers in the Fatima case didn’t). And they all had this experience at once because all were exciting themselves into the same altered state on the same religious occasion, just as with the Fatima events. The well-studied scientific facts of anchoring and memory contamination and the power of suggestion and need of belonging (and thus the need to have seen or felt the same things as one’s comrades, or at least claim to have) would ensure the resulting story became more and more homogeneous over time.
Just as it could have come to be told that the Virgin Mary “appeared” to hundreds of witnesses at Fatima, so it could have come to be told that Jesus “appeared” to hundreds of witnesses at Pentecost. There is no evidence against this being what happened. And it has the highest prior probability, given all the background knowledge we have about how these claims commonly originate and come to be told. Corpses don’t rise. But masses of people do claim divine beings have appeared to them—when all that really happened was a subjective ecstatic hallucination of lights in the sky. It thus doesn’t matter if any Corinthians could “check” Paul’s claim by finding any of these people. If they even did (I thoroughly cover that problem in Chs. 7 and 13 of Not the Impossible Faith), the witnesses would simply report they saw Jesus as a fabulous light, and so decisively felt his presence that they could not be mistaken, and the usual psychosomatic miracles of “tongues” and “healing” proved it. Which is what the Corinthians would already know. And back then, who could prove it wasn’t real?
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/14255
Am I right that all this disqualifies Jesus alleged appearance to 50ü brethren?
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