Goines On: A Jessica experiment

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The day after remembering the Jesus experiment, Goines thought of a corollary, or reverse experiment, one that would seek to establish whether a stand-in for Jesus could elicit the same sort of experience. If so, then that would suggest that it wasn’t the nature of Jesus (or of his stand-in) that produced the Jesus-experience phenomenon, but something about people’s psychology.
    Such an alternative experiment would construct a fictional character (“Jessica,” say) and clothe her in attributes of divinity, supernatural power, etc., similar to those attributed to Jesus. Actors would be recruited to play the pastor and deacons and compose a “congregation of believers” in which to immerse subjects and call on them to confess their sins, accept Jessica, and be saved.
    Providing a congregation was important; Goines had been struck by something one believer he knew had said about experiencing Jesus, that the experience was ecstatic when it occurred in the company of a multitude of fellow believers.
    Thinking of that believer now, however, Goines remembered being told by other Christians that they didn’t really much like going to church because they found many of the people there obnoxious in person. Clearly, the two attitudes suggested that there might need to be two experiments, one with a rousing congregation and a second in which subjects might go on a retreat with one or two actors playing evangelists, say, carefully schooled to avoid saying or doing anything obnoxious.
    Goines would question all subjects who “answered the call” – in either version of the experiment – as to what happened. How would they describe their experience? Did they feel saved? Did Jessica speak to them? Did they feel absolved? Did they feel that Jessica had changed their lives? Etc.
    Actually, Goines suddenly realized, Jesus was basically as fictional a character as the made-up Jessica, even granting that someone named Jesus had traveled around Galilee preaching and assembling disciples and eventually troubling the authorities so much that they ended up executing him. All of the vast rest of this Jesus’ resume had been constructed, reconstructed, copied out, argued over, misquoted, glossed over, and come down to us in a variety of versions depending on churches and their denominations. If much of the story were to be believed, it had to be on faith.
    Remembering his musings about the psychologies of Josh McDowell versus Bart Ehrman, Goines reckoned that these alternative experiments should also try to identify the attributes of individuals who are susceptible or not susceptible to a Jesus-type experience. What was it that made people one way or the other? What allowed people to become true-believers, unshakably attached to something that other people saw no basis for believing? And what protected non-believers from being taken in?

[Tomorrow Goines discovers that a new Jessica experiment probably isn’t required.]

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