Bart Ehrman on “Mass Hallucinations”

In a truly insightful passage from How Jesus Became God, Bart Ehrman wrote, “most people at the end of the day believe that mass hallucinations are not only possible, but that they really can happen. Precisely those conservative evangelical scholars who claim that mass hallucinations don’t happen are the ones  who deny that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to hundreds or thousands of people at once, even though we have modern, verified eyewitness testimony that she has” (2014; HarperOne, 2015, 202). In an earlier book, Ehrman wrote, "It is an extremely well-documented phenomenon that people sometimes have visions of their loved ones after they died. A man sees his wife in his bedroom a month after she was buried; a woman sees her dead daughter; a girl sees her dead grandmother. Happens all the time…. In many instances the person having this experience can talk to the dead person, can give them a hug and feel them. There are documented instances of multiple people having some such visionary experience together, and not just visions of relatives" (Jesus Interrupted, HarperOne, 2009, 178, emphasis added). When Ehrman’s longer book came out, it got the attention of an actual doctor. He confirmed what Ehrman had been saying: “Though visual hallucinations usually are reported by a single individual, there are reports of ‘mass hallucinations’ following some traumatic events” (https://web.archive.org/web/20140514235952/http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/05/13/hallucinations-of-loss-visions-of-grief/). I consider these so-called “mass hallucinations” to be unsettling. Maybe Ehrman’s right about most people believing in mass hallucinations, but I may have to be in the minority here. I tend to agree with Philip Wiebe when it comes to whether we can ever accept mass hallucination as an explanation for anything. According to him, “Group hallucinations are conceivable, but do not provide a plausible explanation for collective perceptual experience. Such an explanation would call into question conventional views about ordinary perception, because shared perceptual experience is basic to our judgment of what is real. Group apparitions provide strong evidence for an external source” (Visions of Jesus, 210). On the other hand, if people are all seeing a dead relative at the same time and place, I have a hard time accepting that the ghost of the relative is actually there with them. I also don’t want to call people liars either. I’m not sure what to believe.