There have been books written and at least one movie I know of that are based on the idea of near-death experiences. An NDE is an episode in which a person suffers some significant medical problem, like a heart attack or a drowning, and almost dies and has some sort of out-of-body experience or vision before being resuscitated. Let me put my cards on the table right at the start: there is really no such thing as a “near-death” experience; it is like saying a woman is “near-pregnant.” Either you are dead or you are not; pregnant or not. As a doctor I never told a woman, “Congratulations! You’re almost pregnant!” I think part of the problem is the term “dead,” or “death.” You might hear someone say, “I died on the operating table, but they brought me back.” What that person probably means is that his heart stopped for some period of time before being started back up again. Heart stoppage is not death. Stopping breathing, as in drowning, is not death. Cardiac surgeons routinely stop a patient’s heart so they can operate, but we do not call that person dead and we do not accuse the surgeon of murder (unless they don’t restart the heart, perhaps!). True death is brain death, the loss of so many brain cells due to lack of oxygen or other insult that the brain ceases to function in any meaningful way. There is no resuscitation from brain death. You can restart the heart or pump air into the lungs or dialyze blood in place of the kidneys, but there is no way to jump-start the brain once it is gone. And who we are – our thoughts and feelings and memories and everything that make us who we are – is in the brain. People who describe these NDE experiences clearly did not experience brain death, or they would not regain consciousness and be able to describe such experiences.
And yet some people in these critical situations say they left their body and saw amazing things, perhaps Heaven and Jesus. If Christian. If Muslim the person might meet Muhammed instead. Or just some euphoric vision. But not always. Some have seen what they interpret as Hell. There have been some who had multiple NDEs and one experience was wonderful and another was awful. If these are true spiritual experiences how is one to interpret them? Will the Savior of our choice be the one to greet us in the afterlife? Do all religions get you to heaven then? How can some individuals experience both Heaven and Hell during these episodes? Is our final destination arbitrary or random? Or does God sometimes have trouble deciding which place to send us?
Some believers want to latch onto these NDEs as proof that the afterlife is real. The concept of NDEs from a spiritual perspective is that near the point of death the soul is set free from the body and can thus experience these other places and people. But if the brain isn’t really dead, as evidenced by the resuscitation, why does the soul leave early? Who decides when the soul gets to go? Is God making a mistake by letting the soul loose before death has really occurred? (The 1978 film Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty as a football player taken prematurely is based on this premise that mistakes can be made and is worth a watch. It is not really an NDE, but it is the only NDE-like movie I recommend!) And once the soul is free, why does it return to the body? How does it know which body to return to? What if somebody else is being resuscitated in the next bed in the ER? Could the soul go to the wrong body? Wouldn’t that be embarrassing? Sounds like the making of another movie, though. The soul of a Palestinian terrorist trades places with that of an orthodox Jew. Or the soul of an anti-LGBTQ preacher goes into the body of a trans woman. Definite possibilities there.
Keep in mind that the brain in this situation is under assault in some way: often there is lack of oxygen in the brain, from the heart stopping or cessation of breathing. There may be a serious infection in the body or other form of toxins circulating into the brain. Potent drugs may be in the system, either treating the underlying disease or in response to the crisis. The reason many (but far from all) of these experiences seems similar (a bright light at the end of a tunnel…) is that we humans all share similar physiology, so we should expect similar results when the brain is under attack. Are you going to take seriously the experiences of a hypoxic, drug-addled or diseased brain? Are you going to base your theology on the visions of a brain in this state? Especially when often such visions are contradictory? The idea of taking NDEs as serious evidence of something supernatural or mystical seems risky at best, and utter folly at worst.[1]
What does this have to do with Jesus?
There is an old idea, sometimes called the swoon theory, suggesting that Jesus did not die on the cross: he merely passed out or became comatose, and then later revived when laid out horizontally in the cool tomb or was deliberately resuscitated by his disciples or the women who came to his tomb later. This theory goes back at least to 1780 and a German theologian Karl Friedrich Bahrdt and many others since then, one of the more popular being found in The Passover Plot, a 1965 book by British biblical scholar Hugh J. Schonfield.
Most scholars do not think the theory is tenable, but it even shows up in the Quran, the holy book of Islam:
That they said (in boast), “We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah”; but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not.
Quran 4:157 (English Translation by Yusuf Ali)
Muslim scholars debate whether this refers to Jesus not really dying as in the swoon theory or that someone else died in Jesus’ place. There are Gnostic texts such as The Second Treatise of the Great Seth from the third century which claim that Simon the Cyrene who the Gospels say carried the cross for Jesus was actually crucified instead of Jesus. The group of British scholars known as Monty Python (ha!) used this idea in their film Life of Brian if you remember the scene. Others suggested that the disciple Thomas was crucified in Jesus’ place, as the name means “twin.”
Suppose Jesus did survive the crucifixion but in the process had a near-death experience. Could he have had a vision of heaven that influenced his mission and his teaching? The problem I see with that is that the Gospels record all of Jesus’ preaching and teaching taking place before the crucifixion, not after. He clearly thought he was on a mission from God long before he was crucified; I don’t see how a crucifixion NDE would have contributed anything to that.
However, there was an event earlier in Jesus’ life and preceding his preaching ministry that could have been associated with an NDE. Mark 1, Matthew 4 and Luke 4 all tell of Jesus going out into the wilderness after his baptism by John. Mark says he was “served by angels”, but Matthew and Luke say that he fasted for forty days, Luke specifically saying, “He ate nothing,” and they both observe that ”He then became hungry.” Bit of understatement there. Even allowing for some exaggeration it sounds like Jesus subjected his body to extreme stress and deprivation, not unusual for spiritual seekers. Could this have induced an NDE? Or at least, delirium. Which Jesus then interpreted as a supernatural journey, perhaps even direct contact with God? It is interesting to note that two other founders of great philosophic/religious orders, the Buddha and Muhammed, were said to have gone on long fasts (the Buddha almost starving himself to death). An extreme fast would have various effects on the body including delirium: could that explain their spiritual revelations? Or at least convince them that they were divinely-chosen messengers with a vital spiritual message to spread? Were three of the major religions of the world prompted by – an empty stomach?
I hope you never have to go through a near-death experience. But we are all going to have a real-death experience some day. Whether you are a believer or not, I encourage you to use your rational mind to contemplate death and its meaning to you, while your brain is still in good working order, rather than relying on the illusions produced by your or someone else’s impaired brain.
[1] Neuroscientist Sam Harris has written on the subject of NDEs. One such article can be found at www.samharris.org/blog/science-on-the-brink-of-death