The Paranormal in the New Testament

All the God-talk at Easter has got me thinking about Biblical miracles. In the Guardian's Face to faith column yesterday, Michael Horan makes the case for the resurrection story being just that, a story, and not something to believe in literally. I say he makes the case, but it's more a sort of ruminating about something he takes for granted. In fact he is bemused that many people still believe that the resurrection and ascension were literally physical, historical events.

Here's how he explains it:

At this distance in time, and with only the New Testament as a source, we cannot know what actually happened after Jesus' crucifixion. Disillusion, confused and frightened, the disciples seem to have returned north to Galilee to resume their fishing. As they reminisced, possibly over many months, recalling their extraordinary experiences with Jesus, links began to form between their mental images of him and then-current messianic expectations. Possibly a part of that imagining was the idea, wholly feasible in their minds, that God had raised Jesus into his presence.

Probably when I was a very young child I took the Biblical miracles literally. But I don't think I was more than ten or eleven when I started to realise they might not be factual.  The pictures of Jesus travelling vertically upwards, like a slow-mo human rocket, seemed silly, and ever since then I was content to take all that as metaphor, without really worrying my head about it. 

But since I got interested in parapsychology I've had to rather modify that view. True, it's not hard to think of claims such as turning water into wine and walking on water as post-hoc imaginings - I'm not familiar with any credible claims of that kind in séance literature, for instance. But the Resurrection is a bit different. Whatever you think about claims of materialising mediums, it can't be denied that a great many people over the past one hundred and fifty years have believed themselves to be briefly reunited with a dead family member, apparently in fully flesh and blood form, that they could touch and embrace. As I mentioned when discussing Helen Duncan (Feb 29) the claims are sometimes very detailed and categorical, and curiously hard to account for. A lot of people have also been convinced by apparitions, although these seem less physical and so perhaps only indirectly relevant.

Without going so far as to make a detailed case for the Resurrection as a common-or-garden parapsychological event, I wonder whether this, and perhaps some of the other Biblical miracles, are actually the imaginative myth-making that is widely assumed - by many Christians as well as atheists. What interests me is the way the modern mind refashions something it can't accept - a 'category mistake', as Horan says. This speculative reframing - 'as they reminisced, possibly over many months...' - is typical of how sceptics explain away apparitional experiences, for instance, as a combination of faulty memory and imagination, which on close examination doesn't really work (I'll come back to that another time). 

Of course the first Christians lived so long ago we can speculate all we like - they aren't here to contradict us. The fact that they belonged to a pre-scientific age means we can consider them prey to all kinds of imaginings. But it's not quite as easy when people living today, or at least quite recently, make claims every bit as extraordinary as anything in the Bible.

This makes me stop and think. I've always understood that it was precisely those miraculous occurrences that launched Christianity in the first place - that people took Jesus's teachings seriously because his doings made him seem literally superhuman, validating his claim to be an emissary of God. It's startling to think that two thousand years later, paranormal claims that the world tends to regard as unexplained 'miracles' again challenge us to rethink our beliefs about our situation.

Comments

[steve from brisbane]

Actually, reading about mediumship made me more sympathetic to there possibly being some form of reality behind the Transfiguration miracle. This is because some descriptions of face transfiguring mediums (a category which was never all that common, it seems) do make the process sound something like an electrical/physical phenomena (and I don't mean cheesecloth!)

These descriptions have all been in books; I have never gone looking on the internet for examples, but they are probably there somewhere.

There has also been some interesting commentary on the miracle at Bethasaida, which describes the perception issues following the restoration of sight to a blind man in such a way that accords with modern medical knowledge. See this link for the story (you have to scroll down to the post "Seeing is Perceiving"):

http://tinyurl.com/2vpn2c

Finally, from a personal perspective, after my father's death (I was in my twenties, he was in his 60's) I had, like I am sure many people do, recurring dreams in which he was still alive, and it turned out that the death had been a "mistake".

You can look at such dreams two ways: firstly, perhaps they are the source of the resurrection story. The disciples heard someone recounting how Jesus appeared to them last night alive; it got retold, and a whole group of people came to believe he really was alive.

However, my reaction was somewhat different. I felt that there was no mistaking what was dream and what was reality, and moreover, at an earlier time when many people died young, surely the general experience of such grieving dreams was more widely known than today. Would it not be likely that the disciples would know of such dreams and dismiss them as evidence of physical resurrection?

It actually made me think the resurrection story was more likely as a reality, rather than less likely.

[Art]

I tend to think that Jesus must of been a near death experiencer. Perhaps on the cross he had fluid in his pericardium, putting pressure on his heart and causing it to stop, and then when that Roman soldier stuck the spear up in him it perhaps knicked the pericardium just enough to let the fluid drain out, and then when they flopped Yeshua on the ground it caused his heart to restart. He was probably in a coma for a few days in the tomb, awoke, and simply walked out of the tomb. One of the reasons why I believe in the Christianity - Near death Experience connection is that there are many verses in the New Testament that bear an uncanny resemblance to things that some near death experiencers say they experienced in their life review. If you go to Kevin Williams NDE website and read the page about the Life Review he states one of the common things they experience during their life review is becoming the other person, feeling their feelings, thinking their thoughts, experiencing everything they experienced during their interactions with them. The New Testament is replete with verses that say essentially the same thing. "You reap what you sow", "Judge not that ye be not judged for in each measure that you judge, you shall be judged in return", "God is Love," and "God is Light". There are a few others. In the book of John when Jesus is in the garden praying he prays, "I pray that they may be one, as we are one, I in you and you in me." Comments about oneness and connectedness run throughout many NDE's, and many NDE's have a very "holographic" flavor about them, and since the life review is a holographic experience par excellance, I'm betting that there might of been a little Jewish Rabbi who was crucified, and during his "death" on the cross, had a NDE and then most of the sayings and teachings attributed to Jesus, were actually taught after he came down off the cross instead of beforehand. Time has a way of being flexible, especially when the stories are retold, months and years afterwards. So, I'm putting my money on Jesus being a Near Death Experiencer and the NDE being holographic experience par excellance. The New Testament and Christianity are essentially a near death experience religion.