“It was like a grab on my collar,” remembers Mark. “Jesus pulled me out.”  “And he looked at me,” says TJ, grinning ecstatically. “And he was like, ‘Jesus?’ I was like, ‘No! No! I’m not Jesus!”  Intrigued by the claims made in the film, which was released after a successful Kickstarter campaign, I decide to call the Dead Raising Team’s [DRT] handsome and charismatic founder where he lives in Texas. Tyler Johnson is 31, an Evangelist and the author of four books, including Stories of the Supernatural and How to Raise the Dead.  He spends his time travelling the US and elsewhere, raising the dead, healing the sick, and giving free lessons to the faithful on how they, too, can exercise the power of resurrection. Through his work, there are now dozens of trained DRT’s across the US as well as in the Netherlands, Sri Lanka and Canada. He is, he says, personally responsible for 13 corpses coming back to life.  I’m surprised to discover that, despite his father being a pastor, Tyler hasn’t always been enthusiastic about religion. “I abhorred Christianity growing up,” he says, of his childhood in Olympia, Washington. “It was plastic to me. It was all about money.”  The Dead Raising Team in action in a still from the film (deadraiser.com)  His life was changed when, at 17, he attended a youth mission to Canada and witnessed a prostitute turning into Jesus. “We were in a red light district at 2AM. They told us to give out roses as a symbol of God’s love. I gave the rose to a prostitute and she turned into Jesus in front of me.”  You saw actual physical Jesus? “Yeah. With my eyes.” What did he look like? “He was more Arab looking that the common image.” Did he have a beard? “He didn’t,” he says. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if he grows it out once in a while.”  'The man jumped up from his stretcher ...'  To the 21st century European reader, all of this may sound rather surprising. But in Tyler’s North American conservative Christian culture, miracles are relatively common. Faith healing, which typically involves a charismatic preacher triggering an apparent medical reversal by praying over a sufferer, is a tradition that reaches back to the late nineteenth century.  One of the most renowned early practitioners, and an inspiration to Tyler, was English plumber Smith Wigglesworth. Born in 1859, Wigglesworth’s displays of religious magic became so popular he abandoned his day job for travels in the US, India, Australia and South Africa. He was remarkable, mostly, for combining spiritual healing with the kind of no-nonsense obduracy that’s peculiar to the Yorkshireman, explaining his violent assaults on the dying by insisting he was attacking Satan.  In Stories of the Supernatural, Tyler writes admiringly of how Wigglesworth once punched a man with stomach cancer in the stomach. “The man was so close to death that this doctor was required to escort him to the gathering. When Smith punched the guy, he flatlined.”  The appalled doctor threatened to have Wigglesworth arrested. “Two minutes later the man jumped up from his stretcher, raised from the dead and totally healed … Another time Smith kicked a child who was completely crippled off the stage.”  Smith Wigglesworth, Yorkshire plumber and dead-raiser (Wikipedia)  Tyler’s own journey into dead-raising began when he was 19 and his father died in front of him. “He was redoing the roof. I’d woken from a nap and joined him. I’d been up there for a couple of minutes when he just keeled over. We brought him down and tried resuscitation.”  It didn’t work. Tyler heard God speaking to him, ‘Son, I want to talk to you alone.’ God gave him a choice. ‘Right now, your Dad is dead. You can believe I’m good and I didn’t do this. Or you can believe I’m responsible for it.’ Tyler decided on the former. “I chose to believe that God was good,” he says.  Tyler discovered verses in the Bible that backed up this unusual notion that God never intended anyone, let alone his father, to die. “Jesus really clearly tells us in John 10:10 the way we can discern what is of the devil is that the enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy. So anytime there’s any killing – that’s the enemy.”  But when he shared his exciting revelation with his mother, she wasn’t at all comforted. To his surprise, she started crying. “I think there’s this security we gain by thinking God’s responsible for all the evil in the world, like he has this big divine plan. But that means the Holocaust was ordained by God and that’s just ridiculous. It’s asinine.”  It took five years for this to percolate into the specific belief that God expects us to summon life into cadavers. Tyler foresees a time coming “very soon” in which “men and women will enter graveyards, call forth a person, and they will crawl from their own grave.”  He pins much of his belief on a key verse from the Bible, Matthew 10:8 in which Jesus says, ‘Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons. ’ “I hadn’t cleansed a leper because I’d never met a leper,” he says. “But I’d seen demons cast out and the sick healed.”  He decided to try it. But there was a problem. “I was like, ‘You’re not going to raise the dead until you find someone that’s dead. So anywhere I got an opportunity, whether it be in the morgue or a funeral home or at a car accident, I just made myself available.”  What was the variety of reactions you got when approaching people? “There isn’t going to be much variety, right? Most people are going to think you’re crazy.”  When Tyler tries to get behind the tape at the scene of an accident, he estimates the police let him through around fifty per cent of the time. When family are present, it’s more like 90. “The bottom line is, regardless of whether you’re atheist and agnostic or whatever, if your loved one dies, you don’t care what it would take to get them back.”  He’s come to know the staff at funeral homes and morgues. Sometimes he gets tip offs: “I just go in and pray during the night while no one’s there visiting the body.” Has it occurred to him to try to bring his Dad back? “It totally has,” he says. “And I won’t say I haven’t tried.”  'Even Jesus himself only raised three people'  Word about Tyler’s attempts spread through his Christian networks and he was soon joined by others who, he says, “were radical enough to believe this stuff. Pretty soon we started holding trainings.” So far, around 1,500 people have been taught by Tyler. “To us, dead raising isn’t just some flippant aside. It’s central to the whole of Christianity. The whole thing is a big sham if one man wasn’t raised from the dead.”  But some Christians say Tyler has made a fundamental error. Dr David Grumett, for example, is Chancellor’s Fellow in Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh as well as being the secretary of the Society for the Study of Theology. “It’s an intriguing idea,” he says. “The first thing to say is not all manuscripts have, in Matthew 10:8, words about raising the dead. Even if we accept it as valid, this was Jesus talking to his 12 disciples.  "It’s one thing to say that they were given that power. It’s quite another to say that people who have no direct contact with Jesus could exercise it. Among the apostles, there’s just one incident of them actually raising someone. Even Jesus himself only raised three people. But my main concern is lack of evidence. The little that’s been made available by them seems unconvincing.”  When challenged on specific events, the first account Tyler provides concerns a friend of his who resurrected a drowned person on a beach in Florida. “I don’t know which beach it was,” he says. When did it happen? “Probably 2007. 2008. I’m so bad with dates.”  Who was the friend? “I don’t usually talk about her name.”  I ask for a resurrection he was personally involved with. “There was a guy in a hospital who’d died,” he says. “We stood and prayed. The next day we came back to pray for a friend. Her husband told us the doctors were astounded because the dead guy was being wheeled to the morgue and suddenly came back. Totally alive! No doctor could make sense of it. I don’t know his name or anything.” When did this happen? “Maybe 2009? I don’t remember what month.”  Tyler Johnson, leader of the Dead Raising Team in a still from the documentary Deadraisers (deadraisers.com)  To an outsider, all of this might seem a little feeble. But for University of London psychologist Professor Chris French, who specialises in paranormal beliefs, that Tyler sees things differently is no surprise. “This happens in the world of paranormal investigators,” he says. “One charismatic leader has a few followers who all reinforce each other. Evidence that to an observer wouldn’t seem that impressive, they’ll see as overwhelmingly conclusive. They genuinely believe what they’re saying.”  According to French, the scientific literature regarding the power of prayer is inconsistent as to its efficacy. “But the most convincing evidence is going to come from properly controlled randomised clinical trials. The results from those kinds of studies say there isn’t any convincing evidence.”  As for faith healing, French recounts an incident in the early Seventies involving evangelist healer Kathryn Kuhlman and follower names Mrs Sullivan who had cancer in her stomach, liver and vertebrae. “It was announced that someone with cancer is being cured. This woman felt a burning sensation which she felt was the holy spirit. She got up on stage, took off her back brace and ran up and down. It was amazing. Then she woke up in the middle of the night in absolute agony because one of her vertebrae had collapsed. She died four months later. But all everyone at the rally will have seen is this person running up and down the stage.”  Still, we’ve always got the testimony of TJ Aderholdt and Chuck the Cannabalistic Humanoid Underground Killer to back up what Tyler’s telling us. For a first hand account of what it feels like to be snatched from the afterlife by a professional deadraiser I call Mark DeDio at his New York apartment.  “When I came to I was very grateful,” he tells me. “But I couldn’t tell anyone what happened. It was just too weird.”  Hang on, I thought he told TJ he’d been to hell? “No, no, no!” says DeDio. “A lot of people get confused about that scene. That guy in the Jesus suit? I don’t know that guy.”  I’m stunned. The film makes it seem like he brought you back, I say. “After that segment there’s a little block of words,” he says. “Go back and watch it.” I do as he tells me. The filmmakers have indeed been careful to provide different dates and locations for each man’s "account".  Tyler agrees it would’ve been better if Deadraisers had featured the actual raising of a dead person.  “That would’ve been a golden ticket, man,” he says. “Everyone in the world would’ve seen the movie if that happened. But it didn’t.”
Last year, a documentary showed a Christian 'Dead Raising Team' apparently   using the power of prayer to bring the dead back to life. Did it win them   any converts?