Grief hallucinations are common: up to half of bereaved spouses report sensing or seeing the dead. The disciples were bereaved. Isn’t this a natural, well-documented phenomenon?

Bereavement experiences are real and common, which is why this is the strongest natural explanation on offer. But the documented pattern is instructive. Bereavement visions are brief, private, rarely involve extended conversation, and the bereaved person almost always knows the loved one is still dead. They comfort; they do not convince people that the dead have physically returned. The disciples’ claim was not that they sensed Jesus’s presence but that he was raised and they ate with him, proclaimed publicly at the risk of their lives, and accepted by a persecutor who was not grieving at all.