August 2025 Book Review

Review of Jonathan Kendall, Seeing the Messiah: An Analysis of the Postmortem Appearances of Jesus Christ and the Lubavitcher Rebbe Against the Backdrop of Apparitional Phenomena. Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2025.

By Rich Robinson

This book occupies a unique niche among books on either the Resurrection or the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The author is a medical doctor at a hospital in eastern Kentucky, board certified in internal medicine and nephrology. This might seem like an unusual choice of author for a book on this subject, but it comes with a foreword by Michael Licona, professor of New Testament Studies at Houston Christian University and endorsements by such people as leading apologist Gary Habermas of Liberty University.

The main focus, and what makes the book unique, is that Kendall analyzes several types of what he calls “apparitions” and uses those phenomena to see whether postmortem appearances of the Rebbe and of Jesus can be explained by reference to them.

We’ve likely all heard about apparitions—alleged appearances of deceased people, former inhabitants of a house now supposedly haunting it, and so on. “When it comes to the matter of apparitional encounters,” writes Kendal, “since I have not had such an experience, I tend to view the phenomenon through a skeptical lens.” He tells us too, that he draws on his approach as a medical doctor to data and evidence.

Kendall is no wide-eyed “convert” to belief in such phenomena. He patiently goes through stories, anecdotes, and scientific investigations to see what is plausible and how things might be explained. And we can note that he is a believer in the resurrection of Jesus.

In summary, Kendall covers seven kinds of general apparitions:

1.     crisis apparations, which occur on the day the agent (the person who makes an appearance or causes an apparition) dies;

2.     apparitions of the living, agents who produce apparitions of others;

3.     haunting apparitions, recurrent appearances in a single location of deceased individuals;

4.     rescue apparitions, featuring someone who appears in order to save someone from trauma or death;

5.     transitional apparitions, seen by people in their last days or moments of life;

6.     reunion apparitions, where a person who recently died appears;

7.     inducible apparitions, where appearances of deceased loved ones can be deliberately produced.

As if that is not enough, the author goes on to discuss apparitions of Jesus and several instances of appearances of the Virgin Mary.

What to make of all this? Kendall distinguishes subjective phenomena (such as hallucinations) from objective ones, produced by some real external cause. Rather than slot apparitions into the category of demonic deceptions, he draws on scientific experiments, quantum mechanics, and the varied phenomena described with each apparition (Did it appear to more than one person? In multiple locations? Over what time frame? Were there expectations or none surrounding the apparition? Were there lasting effects after the apparition left? Is there a relationship to fantasy-prone personalities?). He concludes that some verified appearances may be the result of an agent mentally projecting the apparition through little-understood scientifically explainable phenomena.

Finally, Kendall moves on to alleged appearances of Rebbe Schneerson and compares them to the biblical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, comparing them both to the apparitions he has described. In the end, he finds the Rebbe’s appearances to be explainable on the grounds of “typical” apparitions while the resurrection of Jesus does not match the criteria for those.

This short review cannot convey the depth of research that has gone into this book. What I do want to convey is that this is not a crackpot or unsubstantiated account of apparitional phenomena. It is not a collection of tall tales. Nor is it a debunking of everything to the exclusion of the resurrection. It is a rather rigorous attempt to account for the huge variety of apparitions that have been reported and verified, and to range those alongside what has been said about the Rebbe and about Jesus. I think you will find this book fascinating.