Visionary Experiences in The New Testament
According to Mark 16:9, Jesus "first appeared to Mary Magdalene". However, the earliest versions of the Gospel of Mark end at 16:8, see Mark 16. According to Luke 24:22-24, Mary, and the other women, saw "a vision of angels who said that He was alive". According to Mark 16:5-7 they saw a young man in a white robe who told them Jesus had risen and they would see him in Galilee. According to Matthew 28:1-8 "a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow." According to John 20:11-18, Mary saw "two angels in white", "she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and did not know that it was Jesus ... Supposing Him to be the gardener", but when Jesus said "Mary!", she called him Rabboni.
According to Acts 10:9-16, Saint Peter "became hungry ... fell into a trance" and saw "an object like a great sheet" from Heaven that contained "all kinds of four-footed animals ... crawling creatures ... and birds ... A voice came to him, "Get up, Peter, kill and eat!"" Peter replied that he'd never eaten anything impure, presumably nothing not kosher, as he was a Jewish Christian. The voice said "What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy." This repeated three times and then the sheet was gone. Acts 11:5-10 repeats the story. In Acts 12:5-11 an "angel of the Lord" helped Peter escape from prison, he "thought he was seeing a vision".
The primary vision of Paul of Tarsus is in his Road to Damascus conversion experience. In addition, Acts 16:6-10 records his vision of "a man of Macedonia" and in Acts 18:9-10 the Lord spoke to Paul "by a vision" and in Acts 22:17-18 Jesus spoke to Paul when he "fell into a trance". In 1 Cor 15:1-9 Paul wrote that Jesus was "raised on the third day", that "He appeared to Cephas", then to the Twelve Apostles, then to "more than five hundred brethren at one time", then to James the Just, then to the rest of the apostles, and last of all, to Paul.
Read more about this topic: Vision Hypothesis
Famous quotes containing the words visionary, experiences and/or testament:
“And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love,”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)
“So while it is true that children are exposed to more information and a greater variety of experiences than were children of the past, it does not follow that they automatically become more sophisticated. We always know much more than we understand, and with the torrent of information to which young people are exposed, the gap between knowing and understanding, between experience and learning, has become even greater than it was in the past.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)