If Jesus existed then he may have used hypnosis to do his miracle
healings. If he didn’t then the stories are
based on the life of some other hypnotist (s).
The four gospels in the New Testament report that Jesus Christ did
miracles and healings and cast out demons and after his death, some people
reported that he was alive again.
Ian Wilson in his Jesus: The Evidence
thought it was possible that Jesus used hypnosis to do his miracles and fake
his return from the dead.
Page 201 sneers at the suggestion that hypnosis had anything to do with
the feeding of the five thousand for Jesus could not have hypnotised all
these. True but he only needed to hide
the source of the food and alter the memories of some after the event so that
they thought they saw the food coming from nowhere. One of the greatest hoaxes of all time,
Mormonism started off with only a few witnesses and is becoming a major world
faith. Jesus he only needed a few witnesses
and could slam those who saw what really happened as liars if they told a
different story. He could alter the
memories even without hypnosis. And if
he used hypnosis and their real memories came back when the suggestion wore off
they were likely to stick with what they originally “remembered” to save
face. And the Devil was handy as well to
blame if doubts and unbeliefs crept in.
The crowd was distracted by getting into groups and getting prepared so
heaven knows what Jesus was doing.
The next puzzle is how sceptics like the apostles, Thomas and James and
Paul, were able to see Jesus after the resurrection for doubters are resistant
to hypnosis. But you can regress them
back to a period before they doubted so you can make them believe
subconsciously. And how do we know that
these three men had not changed their minds about Jesus half an hour before
anything happened or believed now and again and disbelieved the rest of the
time?
Hypnosis can’t explain the empty tomb unless Joseph was hypnotised to
send the attendants at the burial away on an errand and remove the body himself
and forget and then get the men to close the tomb without looking inside. The Case for Christ dishonestly gives
no refutation of the hundreds of ways hypnosis could be used to steal a
body.
It is insisted on page 202 that Jesus never spoke to the guests at
He Walked Among Us
suggests that it is absurd to have
It is also
complained that Jesus could not have cured the pagan woman’s possessed daughter
if he was a hypnotist for he never even went to visit her and long distance
hypnosis is not possible. Hypnosis works
through suggestion and all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. It is letting another take over you. The girl could have been better when her
mother arrived home but could only have been in remission. Then when the mother tells her about Jesus’
power the girl develops the mental suggestion that is strong enough to prevent
her going off at the deep end ever again.
The Christians tell the lie that the gospel healings were complete and
sudden unlike most hypnosis cures but there is no need to read the gospels that
way for they are only brief accounts.
Hypnosis can be used to make a person think they are cured and their
thinking that makes them behave as if they were cured and finally get cured for
positive thinking makes the body kick itself back on track.
The Case for Christ
rejects Ian Wilson’s belief that Jesus could have learned hypnosis from the
mystery religions (page 274).
Astonishingly, the book says that hypnosis was not used in the ancient
world! How else did mediums and
initiates get their visions? How else
did they manage to set up centres of faith healing? Healers like Hanina
Ben Dosa must have used hypnosis if the stories about
them are true.
The idea that
Jesus’ powers were not unique when he told his disciples to do miracles for him
in Matthew 10:1 is rejected for the verse says he gave them authority. But the disciples could have had healing
powers like everybody else but only received the authority from Jesus to do
them not the power. The gospel would say
if they received the powers from Jesus for it seeks to prove that Jesus was the
messenger of God. It doesn’t so there
was nothing unique about Jesus’ powers.
None of the gospels say there was.
Jesus once condemned the disciple for forbidding a man to cast out
demons in the name of Jesus though he was not a follower of Jesus. This suggests that Jesus supported occultism
for when the man was doing that instead of learning more about Jesus and
following him he was using Jesus’ name as a magical charm. Was the occultism hypnosis? Probably!
Once, a possession victim was brought to Jesus for the disciples could
do nothing for him and Jesus complained about the lack of faith in the world
and that he could hardly stand it much longer implying they could not cast out
because they had no conviction or too little.
Hypnotists have to be extremely self-assured and confident and have
amazing faith to accomplish any success in their therapy. This is so that the subject may be worked up
to feel confident too. Confidence rubs
off on people.
He Walked Among Us
then says then that using hypnosis would make liars of the disciples and would
mean they were willing to die for their testimony to healings and miracles
performed by Jesus that were actually hoaxes.
But they would have thought that hypnosis was supernatural. And it was not healings etc they were
supposed to have died for but their love for Jesus’ teaching and his
resurrection. And people suffer and die
every day for pious fraud. Funny how
Christians say the apostles allegedly dying for Jesus proves their sincerity
while a person who becomes a Christian heretic which brings in the threat of a
fate worse than death – eternal damnation – is still condemned as unreliable! The absurdity and bigotry and sickly sweet
viciousness of Christianity certainly show the power of self-hypnosis and
self-deception. Human nature is strange
at the best of times. Belief in Jesus is
belief in faith constructed by men. It
is not helpful to say that Jesus directed and guided their faith by the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit. That is
begging the question. It is the very
thing that needs to be proven and it is treated as if it is proven. Any religious leader or inventor could say
the same. Following the faith is really
following what men have created. That
their word is made identical with the word of Christ surely speaks of
Christians using self-hypnosis to have their “faith”.
Hypnotic suggestion doesn’t last that long. People come out of it gradually if the
hypnotist doesn’t bring them out. It is
a fact that all of us do hypnotise ourselves.
We make ourselves believe things when there is an emotional investment
in it for us. The apostles and Jesus’
disciples engaged in prayer and meditation a lot so they knew how to hypnotise
themselves. Hypnotic suggestions can be
put into a persons mind and the person can be programmed to repeat the
suggestion by meditation and prayer so that it lasts longer. In other words, Jesus may have conditioned
the apostles to condition themselves.
Even the most bigoted Christian fundamentalist says the gospels started
off as oral tradition. They claim
without evidence that memorisation of the correct tradition was easy and
commonly practiced in those days so the lack of paperwork to verify the claims
made for Jesus is considered to be a non-problem. There is no evidence for the gospel content
of the oral tradition at all apart from the gospels. Several people bringing their insight in when
the gospel was being invented could explain the signs that seem to indicate
that the gospel was put together from oral tradition. It is possible that people were regressed by
hypnosis to recover the gospel story.
And it is known that this method leaves the person open to
fantasising. The oral traditions could
have started off with the gospel of Mark which was produced by a combination of
history and the use of regression to fill in the missing pieces.
OBJECTION
“One thing that I
did want to comment about was the claim that Jesus used hypnotic means on those
individuals that he came across. This does not seem to be a very valid argument, as there are many loopholes that surround it.
First of all, any
professional psychologist/ hypnotist /psychiatrist will tell
you that post-hypnotic suggestions only last for so long, and as a Christian,
that wouldn't matter, because "true" religious individuals
believe in their hearts, and not so much with their minds. Stating
that Christianity has survived and endured for over one thousand years based on
hypnotism seems like a far
stretch, doesn't it?
A second
concern focuses on the miracles that Jesus performed. While you would
think some of the "simple" miracles could be explained away with
logic, Jesus was specified as able to cure many terminal individuals,
including paraplegics and
lepers. Hypnotizing them to forget about their chronic
conditions would not last very long and would equate to attempting
to suggest to someone that they forget that they are suffering from cancer
or AIDs. In regards to raising individuals from
the dead, it should be noted that Roman physicians (including Luke himself)
were not idiots, as it was very well-known that these professionals received
extensive training in
Another final
aspect concerns the fact that if Jesus hypnotized
everyone that he encountered, he obviously missed the Pharisees , the scribes, the lawyers, the Sanhedrin, and the
various Roman officials that he conversed with throughout his life.
It is common knowledge that various Jewish and Gentile writers and
historians - from Josephus to Tacitus - were
very well aware of who Jesus was, and what he stood for, even if they
didn't believe in it. That's something to ponder.... “
REPLY:
To the first point
the reply is that nothing in the gospels says that most of the people Jesus healed
who really were sick were healed for long.
Most ordinary people would consider even temporary healings as
miraculous but more educated people wouldn’t.
And people who only imagined or faked their illnesses could be “cured”
permanently. And sometimes a person who
is sick can be thought to be suffering from cancer when it is really the flu
and a person like that might start recovering at the time of Jesus claimed to
heal. In such a case, the healing could
have been about to happen anyway and had nothing to do with Jesus’ alleged
power.
A hypnotist can
implant a suggestion in a person and make them crave it so badly that they end
up hypnotising themselves to repeat the suggestion so that the hypnosis can
last for ages. In such cases, the
hypnotist is really just giving a kick start to their powers to hypnotise
themselves. We all hypnotise
ourselves. Some people cure themselves
of depression by reconditioning their minds to see brighter days. They might need a hypnotist or therapist to
be able to get to the stage where they can use suggestion on themselves but
it’s the same process.
You say that
believers believe with their hearts rather than their heads. Are they not hypnotising themselves to
imagine they believe? Feeling that
something is true is the same as believing it.
Belief is a head action. Hypnosis
could explain the two thousand years of Christianity. And besides we don’t need an
explanation. The two thousand years has
nothing to do with showing there is any truth to Christianity.
To the second point
the best doctors in the world in those days didn’t amount to
much and even better doctors in later ages have made huge mistakes. It is only fantasy that Luke trained in
The
third point that if Jesus was such a good hypnotist then why didn’t he use his
powers on the Pharisees and his other enemies? To be
a good hypnotist you have to instil trust in the people you are planning to
hypnotise. You have to be their
friend. Jesus couldn’t expect to
hypnotise his enemies. All the people
Jesus healed came to him or were recommended to go to him. They wanted to be healed. They were amenable then to hypnosis.
Many people convince
themselves they are healed when they are not.
They want to be better so badly that they can switch the pain off.
Finally, we know that
most healing miracles that happen in the Catholic Church are scoffed at even by
the Church itself despite the conviction of the witnesses. This shows the power of hypnosis and
self-hypnosis.
Believing in God, PJ McGrath,
Jesus: The Evidence, Ian Wilson, Pan Books,
Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Volume 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha,
Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995
He Walked Among Us, Josh McDowell and Bill Wilson,
The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel, HarperCollins
and
Jesus the Magician, Morton Smith, Harper & Row, San Francisco,
1978