People are generally pretty credible beings. We will actually believe quite a lot of crazy things if we have some experience that seems to justify that belief. And we can be stubbornly attached to those convictions no matter how much the naysayers mock. In contrast we can stubbornly refuse to believe something unless we have ourselves experienced or witnessed it no matter how convinced or sure other people are. But sometimes we do have those experiences and they do change our mind.

That was what happened to Bruce Grindal co-founder of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and founding editor of Anthropology and Humanism. As James Bishop writes.

For over the period of a year, Grindal lived among the Sisala people of northern Ghana. It was during his research when Grindal says he witnessed a man being raised from the dead. The person raised, by the name of Ali, was a highly respected drummer in the tribe. A few days after Ali’s death, Grindal was invited to witness the burial ritual. He traveled five miles to the village and entered the compound where the corpse was prepared. According to Grindal, “the corpse was already putrid and oozing juices. An old woman was sitting next to the dead man with a fan even though the corpse had been washed about three hours earlier. The stench in the room was horrible” (3).

The burial ritual began the following day near midnight. Ali had been dead for three to four days and his corpse was seated upright against the wall where a group of singers began to dance around it. Grindal explains that he,

“saw the corpse jolt, and occasionally pulsating. The corpse, shaken by spasms, then rose to its feet spinning and dancing in a frenzy. As I watched, convulsions in the pit of my stomach tied not only my eyes but my whole being into this vortex of power. The corpse picked up the drumsticks and began to play. After a while the corpse was once again sitting against the left wall of the compound. In conclusion, I can say with intuitive certainty, that on the night of 23 October 1967 I witnessed the raising of the dead. This experience was real and was seen as such by those who sat to my right in the divination place. It was although everybody present simultaneously touched a live wire. No words were said, indeed, what could be said?” (4)

Grindal rejected his atheism after he witnessed this event. It was an event that had an impact on him throughout his life.

Atheist Professor, Bruce Grindal, witnesses man raised from the dead

In a subsequent post on the subject Bishop examines the various responses to such a claim. Notably he says,

For instance, the claim that the corpse did not rise from the dead becomes the extraordinary claim when we consider several factors, such as it being witnessed by Grindal, a well-educated and scientifically-minded individual, a group of persons, and the fact that Grindal rejected his atheism afterward, wrote about it in a journal, and stood by what he saw. Taking these several factors into account, the extraordinary claim becomes the one made by the skeptic, which is that the corpse did not rise from the dead.

In Defense of Bruce Grindal’s Testimony on the Resurrected Corpse

All this to say, it might explain why the testimony of Thomas may have been particularly powerful because it is the story of a mind that was changed by an encounter so powerful that the ‘extraordinary claim becomes the one made by the skeptic, which is that the corpse did not rise from the dead.’