The Dead Know Nothing? — Near-Death Experiences, Neuroscience, and the Biblical State of the Dead

By Michael Antonio Jeter

The Apostolic Record — The Examined Faith

Near-death experiences occupy a difficult boundary between medicine, consciousness research, personal testimony, and theology. People revived after cardiac arrest sometimes report vivid experiences of leaving the body, entering darkness or light, encountering deceased relatives or religious figures, reviewing their lives, or receiving messages about death and eternity. Other people survive comparably severe events and remember nothing at all.

The experiences should not be mocked or dismissed. They have been documented in prospective clinical studies and are now a legitimate subject of neurological, psychological, and resuscitation research. But respecting the sincerity of an experience is not the same as accepting every interpretation placed upon it.

For the believer who receives Scripture as authoritative, the central question is therefore not simply, “Did this person experience something?” It is: What, precisely, does the experience establish about the state of the dead—and what happens when the interpretation of an extraordinary experience appears to conflict with the Scriptural testimony concerning death?

That question becomes especially important because the biblical record and modern science are not necessarily examining the same moment. Scripture speaks about the condition of the dead and the hope of resurrection. Near-death research ordinarily studies people who approached death and returned. The distinction between dying and being irreversibly dead may be the key to the entire inquiry.

The Scriptural Anthropology: What Is a Living Human Being?

The Hebrew Scriptures begin their anthropology not with an immortal soul temporarily inhabiting a body, but with the formation of a living human being.

And YAH Elohim formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.— Genesis 2:7

The Hebrew term nephesh can denote a living creature, life, person, or self. In this creation account, the man does not first appear as a conscious disembodied entity that is subsequently placed into a body. Dust receives the neshmat chayim—the breath of life—and the man becomes a living nephesh. The anthropology developed in The Great Sleep expresses the formula simply: dust plus breath yields a living person; death reverses that condition.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto Elohim who gave it.— Ecclesiastes 12:7

The biblical vocabulary of death repeatedly emphasizes cessation, silence, sleep, and eventual awakening. Ecclesiastes says that “the dead know not any thing” (9:5). Psalm 146:4 describes a person’s breath departing, his return to the earth, and the perishing of his thoughts. Daniel 12:2 speaks of those who “sleep in the dust of the earth” and later awaken.

Yahshua uses the same imagery when Lazarus dies. “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth,” he tells the disciples, before clarifying plainly that Lazarus is dead (John 11:11–14). Paul likewise centers Christian hope upon resurrection. In 1 Thessalonians 4, those who have died are described as sleeping until Messiah’s return; in 1 Corinthians 15, the answer to death is resurrection and transformation.

Taken cumulatively, these texts produce a recognizable biblical proposition: human life is embodied and conscious; death is repeatedly portrayed as sleep; and resurrection is the awakening. This article does not claim that neuroscience has proved that proposition. It asks whether near-death research has actually disproved it.

Near Death Is Not Necessarily Dead

The phrase “near-death experience” can itself encourage a conceptual mistake. Cardiac arrest is catastrophic, but modern resuscitation can sometimes restore circulation. A person who survives to describe an NDE was therefore biologically recoverable. That fact does not trivialize the experience; it makes its timing crucial.

Did the experience occur immediately before loss of consciousness? During cardiac arrest? During cardiopulmonary resuscitation, when some cerebral perfusion may be restored? During return of spontaneous circulation? During emergence from coma? Or during later memory formation and reconstruction? Retrospective experience alone does not necessarily establish its physiological timestamp.

In a landmark prospective Dutch study published in The Lancet, van Lommel and colleagues studied 344 successfully resuscitated cardiac-arrest patients. Sixty-two patients—18 percent—reported an NDE, while the majority did not. A 2024 scoping review of prospective cardiac-arrest studies found reported NDE incidence ranging from 6.3 to 39.3 percent, with substantial methodological heterogeneity across studies.

This matters. Whatever NDEs ultimately prove to be, they are not an inevitable reported consequence of cardiac arrest. Absence of recall does not prove absence of experience, because brain injury, medication, delirium, amnesia, interview timing, and other factors can affect memory. But neither can the vivid recall of an experience by a minority establish that all persons remain consciously active after death.

What Is the Dying Brain Doing?

The old popular picture of the brain as an electrical switch that simply turns off at the instant the heart stops is increasingly inadequate. The physiology of dying and resuscitation is dynamic.

In 2023, Xu and colleagues analyzed EEG recordings from four comatose patients following withdrawal of ventilatory support. Two showed marked surges of gamma activity, cross-frequency coupling, and connectivity involving regions associated with conscious processing. The investigators did not claim that these electrical patterns proved conscious experience. The sample was extremely small, and the patients could not report what they experienced. The study nevertheless demonstrated that the dying human brain can exhibit organized neurophysiological activity.

The multicenter AWARE-II study examined 567 in-hospital cardiac arrests. Fifty-three patients survived and 28 completed interviews. Eleven of those interviewed reported memories or perceptions suggestive of consciousness. Researchers also recorded EEG patterns compatible with organized activity during prolonged CPR in some patients. Yet the objective perception tests were sobering: no interviewed survivor identified the hidden visual target, and one identified the auditory stimulus.

Those results do not prove that out-of-body perception is impossible. They also do not demonstrate that consciousness left the body. They show why restraint is necessary. Extraordinary reports exist, organized brain activity can occur under conditions once assumed to preclude it, and the precise relationship among brain physiology, experience, and later memory remains unsettled.

A 2025 review in Nature Reviews Neurology proposed an integrated neuroscientific model in which psychological and neurophysiological processes—including network changes, electrophysiology, cellular mechanisms, and neurotransmitter alterations—interact to produce NDE phenomenology. Significantly, the authors frame the relevant conditions as arising before brain death. That distinction is essential: near death is not the same proposition as irreversible death.

Can a Living Brain Produce an Experience That Feels Like Another Realm?

One experiment provides an especially useful caution against equating the reality of an experience with the experiencer’s interpretation of its cause.

In 2018, Timmermann and colleagues administered intravenous N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) or placebo to 13 healthy volunteers. The DMT condition produced experiences with substantial phenomenological overlap with established NDE descriptions, including altered embodiment, transcendent or mystical qualities, and experiences interpreted as entering another realm or encountering entities.

The study does not establish that endogenous DMT causes NDEs, and claims that a decisive DMT release occurs in the dying human brain should not be presented as established fact. The experiment demonstrates something narrower but important: a living brain can undergo an experience containing striking features associated with NDEs without the subject having died.

Accordingly, “I experienced myself outside my body” and “my consciousness actually separated from my body” are not identical propositions. The first reports phenomenology. The second proposes an explanation of that phenomenology.

The Cross-Cultural Problem

Another challenge appears when NDE reports are compared across cultures. Accounts show recognizable recurring features, but they are not theologically uniform. Cross-cultural studies have documented both similarities and meaningful differences in how near-death experiences are described and interpreted.

Belanti, Perera, and Jagadheesan concluded that common themes coexist with cultural differences. Earlier work by Pasricha and Stevenson on Indian cases likewise identified features that differed from larger American samples. More recent scholarship continues to describe a mixture of cross-cultural similarity and diversity.

We should resist a simplistic formula such as “Christians always see Jesus and Hindus always see Hindu deities.” The evidence is more complicated. People sometimes report deceased relatives, unidentified beings, light, religious figures, unfamiliar entities, or experiences not readily reducible to their prior beliefs. Culture may shape interpretation without completely manufacturing the experience.

Nevertheless, the variation creates an epistemological difficulty. If NDEs are treated as direct revelations of one objective postmortem reality, what should be done when their theological content conflicts? An experience interpreted in Christian categories, another interpreted through Hindu categories, and another communicating universalism, reincarnation, or the absence of judgment cannot all independently establish mutually contradictory propositions merely because each experiencer possesses profound subjective certainty.

Phenomenological Certainty Is Not Epistemological Certainty

This distinction may be the most important one in the entire discussion.

A person can sincerely say, “What I experienced was more real than ordinary life.”

That testimony deserves to be heard. It establishes something about the force, clarity, and subjective character of the experience. It does not automatically establish when the experience occurred, what physiological process accompanied it, whether perceived entities existed independently of the experiencer, or whether every message received during the experience was objectively true.

Phenomenological certainty is not necessarily epistemological certainty.

Dreams, hallucinations, anesthesia phenomena, psychedelic states, seizures, and other altered states can generate compelling perceptions without making every perceived object externally real. Conversely, demonstrating that the brain can generate extraordinary experiences does not prove that every NDE is nothing more than hallucination. The responsible conclusion is narrower: subjective vividness alone cannot adjudicate ontology.

What If an Experience Is Genuinely Transcendent?

Not every scholar believes current neurophysiological models are sufficient. Angeli-Faez, Greyson, and van Lommel argued in a 2025 narrative review that some cardiac-arrest NDE evidence may support the possibility that consciousness cannot be fully explained as a product of brain activity. That interpretation is disputed, but it belongs in the evidentiary record.

For a Scriptural inquiry, however, even demonstrating a genuinely transcendent component would not settle the theological question.

Suppose a person reports encountering an overwhelming being of light who communicates that judgment does not exist, repentance is unnecessary, or all religious paths ultimately convey the same revelation. Even if neuroscience could not explain the encounter, “unexplained by neuroscience” would not logically become “therefore a revelation from Yah.”

Scripture itself prevents that inference. Deuteronomy 13 establishes a striking principle: even a sign or wonder is not permitted to overturn what Yah has already commanded. In the apostolic writings, Paul likewise warns that an appearance of light does not authenticate its source, writing that Satan can disguise himself as an “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).

This does not authorize us to diagnose individual NDEs as demonic. Such a claim cannot be established by neurological research, and Scripture does not give the observer license to identify the source of every unusual mental event. The point is epistemological: within the Scriptural worldview, supernatural appearance is not self-authenticating.

If a deceptive experience were intended to persuade, one might expect it to employ symbols capable of commanding the experiencer’s trust. That remains a theological hypothesis, not a scientific finding. Yet Scripture requires the believer to test the message rather than surrender authority to the experience simply because it was extraordinary.

Does the Scientific Evidence Contradict the Great Sleep?

At present, the strongest conclusion is more modest than either side sometimes wants.

Neuroscience has documented remarkable experiences around severe physiological crises. It has observed organized electrical activity in some dying or resuscitated brains. Experimental altered states can reproduce important elements of NDE phenomenology. Cross-cultural research shows both recurring patterns and cultural variation. At the same time, a minority scholarly position argues that some features of cardiac-arrest NDEs remain inadequately explained by conventional neurobiological models.

What the existing evidence has not demonstrated is a permanently and irreversibly dead human being consciously reporting from that condition.

That limitation is decisive for the biblical question. The Scriptural proposition is not that unusual conscious phenomena cannot occur while someone is approaching death, being resuscitated, or recovering. The proposition is that the dead await resurrection.

If an NDE occurs during the physiological process of dying or returning to life, it does not necessarily contradict the biblical sleep of death. It may tell us something extraordinary about the boundary conditions of consciousness without telling us what an irreversibly dead person experiences.

The Evidentiary Finding

The evidence therefore requires several distinctions that popular discussions frequently collapse: dying is not identical to irreversible death; an experience is not identical to its interpretation; an interpretation is not identical to revelation; and an unexplained phenomenon is not automatically a supernatural one.

For the Scriptural believer, resurrection remains the governing hope. The Hebrew Scriptures speak of sleepers awakening from the dust. Yahshua calls Lazarus from death rather than communicating with a conscious Lazarus elsewhere. Paul directs grieving believers toward Messiah’s return, the trumpet, and the resurrection of the dead.

Near-death research does not need to be feared. If anything, it gives us a remarkable opportunity to ask more precise questions about consciousness, memory, the physiology of dying, and the limits of scientific inference.

Nor should experiencers be dismissed. A person may be completely truthful about what was experienced while still being uncertain about what caused it or what the experience ultimately means.

The governing question is therefore not whether an NDE felt real. It is whether the experience establishes what is sometimes claimed for it.

At present, the scientific record establishes that extraordinary conscious experiences can accompany the boundary between life and death. It does not establish that those experiences are observations made by a conscious person after irreversible death. And from within the Scriptural record, even an extraordinary experience cannot overturn the prior testimony concerning death, resurrection, and the authority by which spiritual claims are tested.

Questions for Further Examination

·         What evidence would be necessary to establish that an NDE occurred during irreversible loss of brain function rather than during the process of dying, resuscitation, or recovery?

·         How should the combination of cross-cultural similarities and religious differences in NDE reports affect claims that they reveal one objective postmortem reality?

·         If neuroscience fails to provide a complete explanation for some NDEs, does “unexplained” constitute evidence of postmortem consciousness—or does it identify the present limits of knowledge?

·         If an extraordinary experience communicates a theological proposition contrary to prior Scriptural revelation, what should possess interpretive authority for the believer: the experience or the text?

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Scriptural Sources

Genesis 2:7; Deuteronomy 13:1–5; Psalm 6:5; Psalm 115:17; Psalm 146:4; Ecclesiastes 9:5–6, 10; Ecclesiastes 12:7; Daniel 12:2; John 11:11–14, 23–26; Acts 24:15; 1 Corinthians 15:12–23, 35–55; 2 Corinthians 11:14; 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18.

Primary Scientific and Clinical Studies

·         Parnia, Sam, et al. “AWAreness during REsuscitation - II: A Multi-Center Study of Consciousness and Awareness in Cardiac Arrest.” Resuscitation 191 (2023): 109903. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2023.109903.

·         Timmermann, Christopher, et al. “DMT Models the Near-Death Experience.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 1424. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01424.

·         van Lommel, Pim, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich. “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands.” The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (2001): 2039–2045. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(01)07100-8.

·         Xu, Gang, et al. “Surge of Neurophysiological Coupling and Connectivity of Gamma Oscillations in the Dying Human Brain.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 19 (2023): e2216268120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216268120.

Secondary Scientific and Scholarly Sources

·         Angeli-Faez, Bruno, Bruce Greyson, and Pim van Lommel. “Near-Death Experience during Cardiac Arrest and Consciousness beyond the Brain: A Narrative Review.” International Review of Psychiatry 37, no. 2 (2025): 130–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2025.2503729.

·         Belanti, John, Mahendra Perera, and Karuppiah Jagadheesan. “Phenomenology of Near-Death Experiences: A Cross-Cultural Perspective.” Transcultural Psychiatry 45, no. 1 (2008): 121–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461507088001.

·         Kovoor, Joshua G., et al. “Near-Death Experiences after Cardiac Arrest: A Scoping Review.” Discover Mental Health 4 (2024): 19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-024-00072-7.

·         Martial, Charlotte, Pauline Fritz, Olivia Gosseries, Vincent Bonhomme, Daniel Kondziella, Kevin Nelson, and Nicolas Lejeune. “A Neuroscientific Model of Near-Death Experiences.” Nature Reviews Neurology 21 (2025): 297–311. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41582-025-01072-z.

·         Pasricha, Satwant, and Ian Stevenson. “Near-Death Experiences in India: A Preliminary Report.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 174, no. 3 (1986): 165–170. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005053-198603000-00007.

Source Work

Jeter, Michael Antonio. The Great Sleep: Death, Resurrection, and the End of Religious Deception. The article adapts and expands the manuscript’s Scriptural anthropology and its chapter on near-death experiences with current scientific and clinical literature.