Visions of Jesus Outside Islam

About one American in seventeen reports a waking vision of a religious figure, so seeing Jesus is common rather than a Middle Eastern anomaly. The best named cases are inward by the seer's own account, famous stories drift in retelling, and several celebrated visions of Jesus were voices or angels.

By AI (Claude Fable 5.1, reasoning effort 80; split from its parent, with a new Summary, by Claude Opus 5.5, reasoning effort 40) Draft:  September 2026

Summary

Reports of Muslims dreaming of Jesus are argued in Dreams and Visions of Jesus.  This page supplies the comparison:  how often people in Christian countries report seeing a religious figure, and what the best-known cases outside Islam look like when they are checked.

  • Seeing a religious figure is a common report. In the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, 6.0 percent of American adults said "I personally had a vision of a religious figure while awake."1 The item does not name Jesus, so it is an upper bound for him. Waking hallucinations of any kind are reported by 5.2 percent of adults across 18 countries, and less often in Iraq (1.1 percent) and Lebanon (1.6 percent) than in the United States (8.2 percent).2
  • The one interview study found ordinary people. Phillip Wiebe's 28 percipients "fit the profile of normal people who have aberrant perceptions."3 His best group case, a whole Oakland congregation in 1959, rests on a pastor's estimate and a film that was later stolen.
  • The strongest named case is inward by its own description. Hugh Montefiore saw Jesus in 1936 "in my mind's eye" and was "pretty sure that a photograph would have showed nothing special on it."4
  • Stories drift. Sundar Singh's 1904 vision changes date, place and detail from one telling to the next, and a mission school register conflicts with his account.
  • Several famous "visions of Jesus" were not. William Wadé Harris felt the angel Gabriel speaking inside him. Simon Kimbangu heard a voice. Shaikh Zakaryas's founding vision is not described as Jesus.

Verdict:  outside Islam, as inside it, people sincerely and often report seeing Jesus.  The reports are good evidence about the people who have them and the traditions that shaped them.  None found here carries a second witness or checkable content that would show the figure stood outside the seer's mind.

General-population rates, with the question wording

Survey Sample Question, as asked Yes
Baylor Religion Survey, United States, 2005 (Gallup fieldwork)1 1,651 answering "I personally had a vision of a religious figure while awake" 6.0% weighted (this project's computation from the ARDA data file; the codebook prints 5.9% unweighted); Evangelical Protestant 7.7%, Catholic 6.1%, Mainline 6.5%, no religion 1.0%
same same "I had a dream of religious significance" 23.2%
same same "I heard the voice of God speaking to me" 14.6% (19.1% in 2007)
Pew, United States, 20095 2,003 "a 'religious or mystical experience'-- that is, a moment of sudden religious insight or awakening" 49%, up from 22% in 1962
Pew, United States, 20236 11,201 online "personally encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force" 30%
Pew, United States, spring 20236 separate survey "visited by a dead family member in a dream or other form" 53%
National Opinion Polls, Britain, 19767 national "aware of or influenced by a presence or a power" "rather more than 36 per cent"; 26% of people who never go to church
Pew, ten Christian-majority countries, 20068 national samples "received a direct revelation from God" general public from 3% (South Korea) to 41% (Nigeria); United States 26%
Pew, Latin America, 20149 over 30,000 "received a direct revelation from God" Protestants 65% (Dominican Republic), 63% (Brazil); Catholics at least one in four in many countries
WHO World Mental Health Surveys, 18 countries2 31,261 visual or auditory hallucination while "not dreaming, not half-asleep, or not under the influence of alcohol or drugs" 5.2% lifetime; Iraq 1.1%, Lebanon 1.6%, United States 8.2%
Hardy's Religious Experience Research Unit, Britain, 1969 onward10 first 3,000 self-selected accounts accounts mentioning a vision 544 (18%); no separate count of Christ

The Baylor item is the only national question found about a waking vision of a religious figure.  It does not name Jesus, so 6 percent is an upper bound for "saw Jesus while awake" among Americans.  For scale only, 6 percent of roughly 220 million American adults in 2005 is on the order of 13 million people, more than every published count of Muslim Jesus-dreams put together.11  The rate is highest where belief is highest and about 1 percent among the unaffiliated, which fits both readings:  expectation shapes experience, or the experience produces belief.  A cross-sectional survey cannot separate them.  David Hay's warning about Hardy's self-selected archive applies to every ministry collection too:  "Those who cared to reply to his appeals in the mass media almost certainly did not adequately represent the general public."7

The one interview study of modern Christ-visions

Phillip Wiebe, a Christian philosopher, interviewed 28 people between 1988 and 1993 who reported a direct visual encounter with Jesus, recruited "mostly through advertisements in newspapers and religious periodicals in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, and Australia";  dreams were excluded.3  He says plainly that "the group of cases I have assembled is neither large nor randomly selected, and a study of this kind should be viewed as only exploratory."3  His percipients "did not fit the profile of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, for they were well integrated into society, often held down responsible positions, and so on. They fit the profile of normal people who have aberrant perceptions."3  He concedes that "The content of percipients' experiences [is] probably influenced by their background religious beliefs, such as how Jesus should look and what he would wear",3 and that identifying the figure as Christ "does not appear to admit of justification in a public sense".3

His strongest group case shrinks on inspection.  In May 1959 at Kenneth Logie's Pentecostal church in Oakland, a woman giving testimony reportedly vanished and "in her place stood a figure taken to be Jesus";  Logie "reports that this figure was seen by virtually everyone in the congregation, which he estimated at two hundred people", and a member filmed it.3  Wiebe saw the film in 1965.  By 1991 it "had been stolen from the apartment in which Kenneth lives";  of those who remembered the screening, "One remembers it the way I saw it, another remembers it the way Kenneth describes it, and several others have no memory of having seen the film at all";  one attender "wondered whether the film might have been a film of a (painted) portrait of Jesus".3  Wiebe's verdict on his own best case:  "this incident shows how paranormal claims often (nearly) evaporate under critical scrutiny".3  His one see-and-feel pairing, a Bible student who saw Jesus touch his sick roommate while the roommate "felt something touch his head", is reported by the one who saw.3  A psychiatrist among his percipients, John White, saw the hands of Christ while praying and said he was "fully aware that what I saw was a product of my own brain. I felt that God was, as it were, using my mind as a projectionist uses a projector".3

The strongest named case outside Islam is internal by its own description

Hugh Montefiore, born into a leading Anglo-Jewish family, became a Cambridge New Testament scholar and Bishop of Birmingham.  He told the story the same way in 1993, 1995 and 1998.  In his study at Rugby School in 1936, aged 16:  "I suddenly became aware of a figure in white whom I saw clearly in my mind's eye. I use this expression because I am pretty sure that a photograph would have showed nothing special on it."4  "Instinctively I knew that this was Jesus, heaven knows how: I knew nothing about him."4  His 1998 book gives the context that qualifies the last clause:  excused chapel and religious lessons, he had a tutor hired by his father who gave him a Sunday lesson each week, and "In that way I began to learn quite a bit not only about the Bible, but about the Mishnah and the Talmud".12  His own verdict:  "Many explanations of such visions of Jesus have been attempted (Wiebe, 1997), but, so far as I am concerned, it was an incursion of the Transcendent into my life."12  The case is sincere, stable and candid, from a man with nothing to gain.  It is a single witness, the figure is the standard English image of Jesus saying a Gospel phrase, and the seer says a camera would have shown nothing.

Sundar Singh, and how a story drifts

Sundar Singh's conversion is the best-known non-Muslim vision of the twentieth century.  In his own account, printed by the Oxford scholar B. H. Streeter in 1921, he rose at 3 a.m. on 18 December 1904, three days after burning a Bible in front of his father, resolved to lie on the railway line unless God showed him the way.  "At 4.30 A.M. I saw something of which I had no idea at all previously. In the room where I was praying I saw a great light. I thought the place was on fire."13  "Then as I prayed and looked into the light, I saw the form of the Lord Jesus Christ. It had such an appearance of glory and love. If it had been some Hindu incarnation I would have prostrated myself before it."13  The words he heard are those of Acts 9:4.  He said he then did not know Paul's story, and Streeter adds:  "though, of course, on a point of that kind the human memory cannot be implicitly relied on."13  Streeter's own verdict accepted "a real and definite Divine call" while granting that "the form in which it was received was conditioned by psychological laws."13

Oskar Pfister, a Zürich pastor and psychoanalyst, collected the missionaries' letters and every published telling in 1926.  The Bible-burning is one event long before, two days before, three days before, or repeated, depending on the telling.  The first biographer's first edition "knows nothing at all of the conversion".14  And the mission register conflicts with the story:  "But on 1 April 1904 he was entered in the Ludhiana register of pupils; on 18 Dec. 1904, as Sundar often told in Switzerland, the conversion took place."14  Even Sundar's defender Friedrich Heiler conceded, in Pfister's quotation, "I do not even think it impossible that Sundar Singh's conversion story is already overgrown with legendary features, indeed that he only gradually came to paint his conversion in that imaginative form".14  Pfister himself did not call the vision a fraud;  he called it a real experience that resolved a conflict "as with Moses, Paul and many others".14  Wiebe's own summary of the case, taken from a later biography, moves the vision to 1903, puts the burning "in public" and has Jesus emerge from "A bright cloud".3  A second-hand retelling drifted on date, place and imagery inside one book.

Famous "visions of Jesus" that were not

Four of the cases most often listed with Christ-visions were not visions of Jesus.  William Wadé Harris, whose 1913–15 movement on the Ivory Coast is in the colonial records, told a missionary in 1926 of his 1910 prison call:  "He did not see Gabriel with his eyes, but he went into a trance and felt him speaking inside him."15  Simon Kimbangu, founder of Africa's largest independent church, "heard a voice saying to him, 'I am Christ, My servants are unfaithful. I have chosen you to bear witness before your brethren and to convert them. Tend My flock.'"  His wife "heard him answer".16  Shaikh Zakaryas's founding vision in Ethiopia is not described as Jesus by the missionary who knew his movement, and what followed was years of study:  "after he had secured a Bible through our Mission, he began with much zeal to compare the Bible and the Koran."17  And Nabeel Qureshi, the best-documented case in Dreams and Visions of Jesus, saw crosses, animals, a doorway and a staircase.

Converts to Christianity from other religions report the same experiences.  A 2018 review notes that among Buddhist converts "an encounter with the supernatural" was one of three factors, and that Hindu-background converts "spoke about visions, dreams, mystical experiences, miracles, and answers to prayer as being critical points".18  The Muslim figures need a comparison base rate before they can be read as special, and none exists.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion.  Baylor Religion Survey, Wave I (2005).  Association of Religion Data Archives.  2005.  A national US sample of 1,721 adults, fieldwork by the Gallup Organization.  Item wordings from the ARDA codebook;  the weighted rate and the breakdown by tradition are this project's computation from the ARDA data file with the survey's WGT variable.  Wave II (2007, n = 1,648) dropped the waking-vision item.  Licence unknown.

    1. 1a.

      Section Q28:  “Please indicate whether or not you have ever had any of the following experiences...d. I personally had a vision of a religious figure while awake.”  Yes 98 of 1,651 answering, 5.9% unweighted, 6.0% weighted;  by tradition (weighted, n answering):  Black Protestant 10.0% (36), Evangelical Protestant 7.7% (490), Mainline Protestant 6.5% (422), Catholic 6.1% (367), Other 2.8% (81), Jewish 1.8% (45), None 1.0% (181).  Other Q28 items, unweighted:  "I had a dream of religious significance" 23.2%;  "I heard the voice of God speaking to me" 14.6% (19.1% in Wave II, 2007, Q26). ↩ ↩ ↩

  2. 2.

    McGrath, John J. et al.  “Psychotic Experiences in the General Population: A Cross-National Analysis Based on 31,261 Respondents From 18 Countries.”  JAMA Psychiatry 72(7):697–705.  2015.  WHO World Mental Health Surveys, household probability samples, including Iraq (n = 4,329) and Lebanon (n = 1,029).  Read from the PMC author manuscript.  Copyright.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 2a.

      Section Results:  “Lifetime prevalence (se) of at least 1 PE was reported by 5.8% (0.2) of the 31 261 respondents. Lifetime prevalence of any HE was 5.2% (0.2) and of any DE 1.3% (0.1).”  Table 2:  Lifetime any hallucinatory experience:  Iraq 1.1% (SE 0.2), Lebanon 1.6% (0.4), United States 8.2% (0.9), Netherlands 10.1%, São Paulo 13.3%.  Section Methods:  “to determine if the reported PEs ever occurred when the person was 'not dreaming, not half-asleep, or not under the influence of alcohol or drugs'. Only responses of the latter type are considered here.” ↩ ↩

  3. 3.

    Wiebe, Phillip H.  Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today.  Oxford University Press, New York.  1997.  A Christian philosopher (Trinity Western University) who interviewed 28 people reporting a visual encounter with Jesus, 1988–1993, recruited mostly by advertisement.  Read in whole paragraphs on archive.org (item visionsofjesusdi0000wieb, printdisabled) with bin/iapdsearch.py;  printed page = leaf − 12, anchored at leaves 50, 200 and 280 and against the book's index.  Copyright;  not stored.

    1. 3a.

      Page 40:  “mostly through advertisements in newspapers and religious periodicals in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, and Australia”.  “The interviews were conducted between 1988 and 1993.”  Dream experiences were excluded (p. 40). ↩

    2. 3b.

      Page 41:  “I recognize that the group of cases I have assembled is neither large nor randomly selected, and a study of this kind should be viewed as only exploratory.” ↩

    3. 3c.

      Page 210:  “the percipients that I interviewed did not fit the profile of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, for they were well integrated into society, often held down responsible positions, and so on. They fit the profile of normal people who have aberrant perceptions.” ↩ ↩

    4. 3d.

      Page 213:  “The content of percipients' experiences [is] probably influenced by their background religious beliefs, such as how Jesus should look and what he would wear”.  The OCR reads "1s" for "is". ↩

    5. 3e.

      Pages 219–220:  “I consider the general problem of identifying an experience as Christic ... to be incapable of satisfactory resolution. Something evidently convinces percipients that the experience is Christic, but the claim does not appear to admit of justification in a public sense”. ↩

    6. 3f.

      Page 78:  “she disappeared from view, and in her place stood a figure taken to be Jesus”.  “reports that this figure was seen by virtually everyone in the congregation, which he estimated at two hundred people”.  Kenneth Logie's Pentecostal Holiness church, Oakland, May 1959;  a member filmed it on 8 mm. ↩

    7. 3g.

      Page 78:  “had been stolen from the apartment in which Kenneth lives”.  “spoke with four or five persons who were present in his church in 1959 when the incident took place. They supported the account given above”.  Page 79:  “One remembers it the way I saw it, another remembers it the way Kenneth describes it, and several others have no memory of having seen the film at all”.  “wondered whether the film might have been a film of a (painted) portrait of Jesus”. ↩

    8. 3h.

      Page 79:  “this incident shows how paranormal claims often (nearly) evaporate under critical scrutiny”.  Page 82:  “Perhaps nothing can be established beyond reasonable doubt concerning the Oakland experience, in view of the unavailability of the film for critical scrutiny”. ↩

    9. 3i.

      Page 76:  “later said that although he did not see anyone, he felt something touch his head”.  Page 41:  “one unusual case in which one percipient only saw that which another person only felt as a tactile sensation”.  John Occhipinti, aged 19, and his roommate Nathan, at a Bible college;  Nathan's account is reported through John. ↩

    10. 3j.

      Pages 82–83:  “fully aware that what I saw was a product of my own brain. I felt that God was, as it were, using my mind as a projectionist uses a projector”.  John White, a psychiatrist at the University of Manitoba. ↩

    11. 3k.

      Page 21:  Wiebe's summary of Sundar Singh, from Cyril J. Davey's biography (note 54, p. 233), puts the vision in 1903 at age fourteen, the Bible burned "in public", and Jesus emerging from "A bright cloud".  Sundar's own Kandy account in Streeter has 18 December 1904, a Bible burned in front of his father, and "a great light". ↩

  4. 4.

    Montefiore, Hugh.  Oh God, What Next?  Hodder & Stoughton, London.  1995.  Autobiography.  Montefiore (1920–2005) was a Cambridge New Testament scholar and Bishop of Birmingham, from a leading Anglo-Jewish family.  Read in whole paragraphs on archive.org (item ohgodwhatnext0000mont, printdisabled) with bin/iapdsearch.py;  printed page = leaf − 10 for the early pages, anchored at leaves 11, 20 and 100.  Copyright;  not stored.

    1. 4a.

      Page 1:  “I suddenly became aware of a figure in white whom I saw clearly in my mind's eye. I use this expression because I am pretty sure that a photograph would have showed nothing special on it.”  "about 5 pm one dark wintry afternoon in 1936", in his study at Rugby School, aged 16;  he heard the words "Follow me". ↩ ↩

    2. 4b.

      Page 1:  “Instinctively I knew that this was Jesus, heaven knows how: I knew nothing about him.” ↩

  5. 5.

    Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.  “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths: Eastern, New Age Beliefs Widespread.”  Pew Research Center.  Dec 9, 2009.  Telephone survey of 4,013 US adults in August 2009;  the experience item was asked of one half-sample (n = 2,003).  Copyright.

    1. 5a.

      Page 12:  “In response to a separate question, half of Americans (49%) say they have had 'a religious or mystical experience – that is, a moment of religious or spiritual awakening.'”  “In 1962, only 22% of Americans reported having had such an experience, which grew to about a third in 1976 (31%) and 1994 (33%).”  Page 19:  Topline Q.290 wording:  "Would you say that you have ever had a 'religious or mystical experience'-- that is, a moment of sudden religious insight or awakening?"  Report p. 12 by group:  white evangelicals 70%, black Protestants 71%, mainline Protestants 40%, Catholics 37%, unaffiliated about 30%.  Printed page = PDF page − 1 (PDF p. 13 prints folio 12). ↩

  6. 6.

    Pew Research Center.  “Spiritual experiences (chapter 4 of Spirituality Among Americans).”  Pew Research Center.  Dec 7, 2023.  American Trends Panel Wave 132, online, 31 July to 6 August 2023, n = 11,201.  Copyright.

    1. 6a.

      Section chapter introduction, paragraph 3:  “Almost half of U.S. adults (45%) report ever having had a sudden feeling of connection with something from beyond this world, while three-in-ten say they have personally encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force.”  Section Communication from the deceased:  “53% of U.S. adults said they had ever been visited by a dead family member in a dream or other form.”  The 53% is from a separate spring 2023 Pew survey cited in the chapter. ↩ ↩

  7. 7.

    Hay, David.  Exploring Inner Space: Scientists and Religious Experience.  Penguin, Harmondsworth.  1982.  Hay, a zoologist and later director of the Religious Experience Research Unit, reports the 1976 National Opinion Polls survey (Hay and Morisy 1978).  Read in whole paragraphs on archive.org (item exploringinnersp0000hayd, printdisabled) with bin/iapdsearch.py;  printed page = leaf − 2 by the running heads at leaves 18 and 120.  Copyright;  not stored.

    1. 7a.

      Page 118:  “rather more than 36 per cent of the sample of people approached by N.O.P. in Britain said that they had at some time been aware of or influenced by a presence or a power.”  Page 126:  “Churchgoing does not necessarily imply report of religious experience.”  26% of those who never go to church said yes;  non-churchgoers were 311 of the 678 who said yes. ↩

    2. 7b.

      Page 111:  “Those who cared to reply to his appeals in the mass media almost certainly did not adequately represent the general public. In fact the group was heavily overloaded with elderly and female respondents”.  Page 209:  “Many are the young people brought up in a tightly controlled religious environment who have strained to conform to the proper image of hierophany within their group; to hear the call they are supposed to hear, or see the vision, or speak with tongues, only to fail. Worse still, because the pain of being an outsider is too much, they may mimic the whole thing”. ↩

  8. 8.

    Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.  “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals.”  Pew Research Center.  Oct 2006.  Random samples of the public in ten countries plus oversamples of pentecostals.  Read from the library PDF;  pages from the printed footers.  Copyright.

    1. 8a.

      Page 19:  “Question wording: Have you ever (insert item)? ... d. received a direct revelation from God?”  General public yes:  United States 26%, Brazil 35%, Chile 22%, Guatemala 39%, Kenya 39%, Nigeria 41%, South Africa 33%, India (Christian localities) 17%, Philippines 27%, South Korea 3%.  Pentecostals higher everywhere. ↩

  9. 9.

    Pew Research Center.  “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region.”  Pew Research Center.  Nov 13, 2014.  More than 30,000 face-to-face interviews in 18 countries and Puerto Rico, October 2013 to February 2014.  Pages from the printed headers.  Copyright.

    1. 9a.

      Page 65:  “Roughly two-thirds of Protestants in the Dominican Republic (65%) and Brazil (63%) say they have received a direct revelation from God, as have a majority of Protestants in Colombia (58%).”  Page 66:  “Among Catholics, at least one-in-four in many countries say they have received a direct revelation from God.” ↩

  10. 10.

    Hardy, Alister.  The Spiritual Nature of Man: A Study of Contemporary Religious Experience.  Clarendon Press, Oxford.  1979.  Hardy, a zoologist and FRS, founded the Religious Experience Research Unit at Oxford in 1969 and classified the first 3,000 accounts sent in after newspaper appeals.  Read in whole paragraphs on archive.org (item spiritualnatureo0000hard, printdisabled) with bin/iapdsearch.py;  printed page = leaf − 14, anchored at leaves 47, 100 and 160 and by the book's own cross-references.  Copyright;  not stored.

    1. 10a.

      Pages 32–33:  “among our first three thousand records received there were no fewer than 544 examples of visions sent in by those who felt them to be of a religious nature”.  Page 33:  “It is well known among psychologists that, with suitable subjects, apparitions can be produced at the will of the experimenter using hypnotic suggestion.”  The book gives no separate count of visions of Christ. ↩

  11. 11.

    6.0% of about 220 million US adults in 2005 is about 13 million.  This is the project's extrapolation from the Baylor item for scale only, not a survey figure, and the item does not name Jesus.1 ↩

  12. 12.

    Montefiore, Hugh.  On Being a Jewish Christian: Its Blessings and Its Problems.  Hodder & Stoughton, London.  1998.  Read in whole paragraphs on archive.org (item onbeingjewishchr0000mont, printdisabled) with bin/iapdsearch.py;  printed page = leaf − 14 for the early pages, anchored at leaves 20, 27 and 100.  Copyright;  not stored.

    1. 12a.

      Page 13:  “In that way I began to learn quite a bit not only about the Bible, but about the Mishnah and the Talmud”.  “Although I had never even read the New Testament, or attended a Christian service of worship, I knew immediately that the figure was Jesus, and I heard the words 'Follow me'.” ↩

    2. 12b.

      Pages 13–14:  “Many explanations of such visions of Jesus have been attempted (Wiebe, 1997), but, so far as I am concerned, it was an incursion of the Transcendent into my life.”  Page 14:  He adds an unsourced claim that "60 per cent of all Messianic Jews in Israel were never evangelised, but, like me, had a vision or something similar", which is hearsay and is not used here. ↩

  13. 13.

    Streeter, B. H., and A. J. Appasamy.  The Sadhu: A Study in Mysticism and Practical Religion.  Macmillan, London.  1921.  Streeter was the Oxford New Testament scholar of the four-source hypothesis.  The authors interviewed Sundar Singh at Oxford and print his own account from his Kandy addresses.  Read from the archive.org OCR text in the source library;  pages from the running heads.  Public domain.

    1. 13a.

      Page 6:  “At 4.30 A.M. I saw something of which I had no idea at all previously. In the room where I was praying I saw a great light. I thought the place was on fire.”  The OCR has "'was" for "was". ↩

    2. 13b.

      Page 6:  “Then as I prayed and looked into the light, I saw the form of the Lord Jesus Christ. It had such an appearance of glory and love. If it had been some Hindu incarnation I would have prostrated myself before it.” ↩

    3. 13c.

      Page 8:  “He also thinks that at that time he did not know the story of St. Paul's conversion; though, of course, on a point of that kind the human memory cannot be implicitly relied on.” ↩

    4. 13d.

      Page 9:  “we have no hesitation in affirming our conviction that the Sadhu did in this vision receive a real and definite Divine call. But we do not on that account feel any inclination to deny that the form in which it was received was conditioned by psychological laws.”  The OCR breaks "hesitation" across a line as "hesi tation". ↩

  14. 14.

    Pfister, Oskar.  Die Legende Sundar Singhs: Eine auf Enthüllungen protestantischer Augenzeugen in Indien gegründete religionspsychologische Untersuchung.  Paul Haupt, Bern and Leipzig.  1926.  Pfister was a Zürich Reformed pastor, chairman of the Swiss General Mission Society, and a psychoanalyst.  He collected missionaries' letters and compared every published telling.  A hostile witness with a psychoanalytic frame, and he says so.  Read from the archive.org OCR text in the source library;  printed page numbers survive as standalone lines, and the book's own cross-reference on p. 62 back to p. 61 confirms them.  Translations are this project's;  the German is given.  Public domain in the United States.

    1. 14a.

      Page 65:  “the first knows nothing at all of the conversion”.  German:  "die erste weiss von der Bekehrung gar nichts".  Of Alfred Zahir's first edition;  the conversion scene appears only in his second. ↩

    2. 14b.

      Page 66:  “But on 1 April 1904 he was entered in the Ludhiana register of pupils; on 18 Dec. 1904, as Sundar often told in Switzerland, the conversion took place.”  German:  "Allein am 1. April 1904 war er in die Schülerliste von Ludhiana eingetragen; am 18. Dez. 1904 fand, wie Sundar in der Schweiz öfters erzählte, die Bekehrung statt."  The OCR has "ı." for "1." and "war-er".  Mrs. Parker's biography has him go to Ludhiana only after the conversion. ↩

    3. 14c.

      Page 235:  “That fantasy was at play in the Sadhu's conversion experience, or in his telling of it, I do not deny and never denied. I do not even think it impossible that Sundar Singh's conversion story is already overgrown with legendary features, indeed that he only gradually came to paint his conversion in that imaginative form”.  Friedrich Heiler, the Sadhu's chief defender, as quoted by Pfister.  German:  "Dass beim Bekehrungserlebnis des Sadhu, bezw. bei seiner Bekehrungserzählung die Phantasievorstellung im Spiele war, bestreite und bestritt ich keineswegs. Ich halte es nicht einmal für ausgeschlossen, dass schon Sundar Singhs Bekehrungserzählung von legendären Zügen umrankt ist, ja, dass er erst allmählich dazu gekommen ist, seine Bekehrung in jener phantasiemässigen Form auszumalen".  The same page reports that the Jesuit historian H. Hosten called the vision an invention. ↩

    4. 14d.

      Page 267:  “The conversion vision resolves, as with Moses, Paul and many others, by an automatic-eruptive route, the conflict that could not be settled by sober thought”.  German:  "Die Bekehrungsvision löst, wie bei Mose, Paulus und vielen anderen auf automatisch-eruptivem Wege den Konflikt, der durch besonnenes Denken nicht erledigt werden kann". ↩

  15. 15.

    Haliburton, Gordon MacKay.  The Prophet Harris: A Study of an African Prophet and His Mass-Movement in the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast, 1913–1915.  Oxford University Press, New York.  abridged edition.  1973.  A historian's study from colonial and mission archives;  the abridgement of the 1971 Longman edition.  Read in whole paragraphs on archive.org (item prophetharris0000gord, printdisabled) with bin/iapdsearch.py;  printed page = leaf − 24 at five points checked.  Copyright;  not stored.

    1. 15a.

      Page 27:  “He did not see Gabriel with his eyes, but he went into a trance and felt him speaking inside him.”  Page 69:  “Some observers believed that the revelations he received from Gabriel during his time at Axim were affected by outside suggestion.”  Harris's call in a Liberian prison in 1910, as he told the Methodist missionary Pierre Benoit in 1926. ↩

  16. 16.

    Martin, Marie-Louise.  Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church.  Eerdmans, Grand Rapids.  Translated by D. M. Moore.  1975.  A Swiss theologian who taught at the Kimbanguist church's theological school;  a sympathetic insider.  Read in whole paragraphs on archive.org (item kimbanguafricanp0000mart, printdisabled) with bin/iapdsearch.py;  printed page = leaf − 28 by the running heads on leaves 73 and 74.  Copyright;  not stored.

    1. 16a.

      Page 44:  “Simon Kimbangu heard a voice saying to him, 'I am Christ, My servants are unfaithful. I have chosen you to bear witness before your brethren and to convert them. Tend My flock.'”  “But night after night Simon Kimbangu heard the same voice calling him, and his wife heard him answer.” ↩

  17. 17.

    Iwarsson, Jonas.  “A Moslem Mass Movement toward Christianity in Abyssinia.”  The Moslem World 14(3):286–289.  Translated by N. Rodén.  Jul 1924.  A Swedish Evangelical Mission missionary in Asmara, the mission that supplied Zakaryas's Bible;  translated from Svensk Missionstidskrift 1924, no. 1.  Read from the archive.org OCR of the whole issue in the source library;  pages from the running heads.  Public domain.

    1. 17a.

      Page 286:  “after he had secured a Bible through our Mission, he began with much zeal to compare the Bible and the Koran.”  Page 288:  “told me that the number baptized then approached ten thousand, and that the leaders could be counted by hundreds. That was, perhaps, an exaggeration.” ↩

  18. 18.

    Das, Rupen.  “Becoming a Follower of Christ: Exploring Conversion Through Historical and Missiological Lenses.”  Perichoresis 16(1):21–40.  2018.  A review, not a study.  Pages from the running heads.  Licence not stated.

    1. 18a.

      Pages 31–32:  “Kelly Hilderbrand, who conducted research on Buddhist converts to Christianity, listed three factors that contributed to their conversion—an encounter with the supernatural, contact with Christians, and dissatisfaction or incongruence with their traditional faith (Hilderbrand 2016). These results are comparable to those of Woodberry. Joshua Iyadurai, analysing the conversion narratives of persons from mainly Hindu backgrounds, had similar findings, with emphasis on the supernatural. The converts spoke about visions, dreams, mystical experiences, miracles, and answers to prayer as being critical points in their 'transformative conversion experience' (Iyadurai 2015).” ↩