Dale Allison asserts that reports of tangible apparitions create "real ambiguity" concerning the evidential force of the Gospel stories about Jesus being tangible and eating. Is this true?I argue that it isn't. Even aside from the quite uncritical approach that Allison takes to modern apparition reports, the reports as he recounts them are evidentially far less clear than the Gospel stories. While some (apparently only one-person) reports do tell of polymodal experiences, including touch, many others recount vision without hearing, hearing without vision, mere sense of presence, appearing only briefly and then disappearing while doing nothing else, etc. Nor do they correspond to the reports of *group* appearances of Jesus that are strongly polymodal, tangible, and interactive. All of this makes a major difference to probabilities.But as usual, Allison takes the unfalsifiable approach of dismissing details of the Gospel stories as not really being part of the original evidence at all in direct proportion to the extent to which they falsify an apparition theory!
