The Paranormal in the Bible and in Old Norse Literature—Superstition?

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2003 by Lisa Schwebel

THE PARANORMAL IN THE BIBLE AND IN OLD NORSE LITERATURE--SUPERSTITION? By Nils Bjorn Kvastad, translated by Stephen C. Timmons. Varnassi, India: Rishi Publications, 2001. Pp. xii-376. $30.00 (hardback). $16.00 (paperback) ISBN 81-85193-27-4.

At the beginning of this book, Kvastad says he has no intention of discussing the historical truth of the Norse sagas and the Bible, but rather of assessing whether the paranormal accounts in them "are possible according to contemporary science" (p. 46). Thus, the reader would expect the book to look at seemingly paranormal claims found in the Bible and the sagas (an odd combination, but more about that below) and set them alongside apparently similar nonreligious paranormal claims to see what contemporary parapsychological research has to say about them. For example, where characters in the Bible seem to predict events before they take place, the book would examine pre-cognitive experiences in general and survey the scientific literature concerning them. It would then ask what light these experiences and contemporary research throw on the ancient accounts, and go on to analyze the difference a religious context makes to these experiences.

From the point of view of biblical exegesis, such a book could show that the twentieth-century Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann's project of demythologizing the Bible--the preeminent and prevailing approach to the Bible for the last half-century warrants reevaluation. Bultmann (1952), who popularized the idea that Christian faith should not depend on historical research, claimed that accounts of paranormal activity in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are not to be treated as descriptions of objective events because they stand outside the accepted conventions of natural science, but instead interpreted or eliminated as myths (in the sense of fantasy). However, if parapsychological research into precognition, telepathy, and psychokinesis can show that these experiences are reported cross-culturally and transhistorically by nonbelievers and believers alike and are thus part of the natural flow of human experience, then their appearance in the Bible cannot be dismissed as the mythological cosmology of the age in which they were written. Rather, biblical scholars will need to reconsider the role and significance of these events as actual events within the biblical narratives.

From a different but related perspective, one in which paranormal events are thought to be the ground of Jesus' faith and of the faith that others had in him--that is, the idea that Jesus' spirituality, not to mention his authority, rested in large part on his paranormal abilities, his reputation for both working and also benefiting from miracles--an analysis which showed that Jesus' abilities were neither unique nor unusual would shift the emphasis away from what Jesus and other biblical figures did, in the way of special effects, and back toward how they lived and what they said or preached. Had Kvastad actually done this (and the topic has been suggested by both Catholic (Heaney, 1984) and Protestant (Kelsey, 1976) thinkers, it would have been an interesting and significant contribution to both the fields of religion and parapsychology.

Unfortunately, the book does not reference any exegetical scholarship, modern or otherwise, on such relevant topics as dating, authorship, background, and context of the various biblical texts, which is, to say the least, a considerable drawback in a book that looks to discuss the Bible. (1) The closest the book comes to a discussion of background research is a comment by the sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther to the effect that the Bible was the "work of the Holy Spirit." What Luther or religion intend by this phrase is not gone into; Kvastad says this means that the Bible is the result of "automatic writing" (p. 304), and leaves it at that as if, having said that, there is nothing more to know. This is because Kvastad--who lists as his qualifications for writing this book, having been on the research committee of the Norwegian Parapsychological Society, a past member of the International Association for the Study of Near Death Experiences (IANDS), and the author of "a book in English on mysticism" (p. xv) which he does not name and which I could not find--is not really interested in exegesis, or for that matter, in meaning at all. What he is interested in is picking out, labeling, and piling up example after example of what he believes are paranormal incidents in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Norse sagas.

Before we look at these examples, Kvastad's lumping together of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Viking sagas, two living religions with one dead one, only makes sense when one realizes that Kvastad is not actually interested in religion at all. That is, he is nowhere concerned with the religious, absolute reality (he consistently mistakes the relative for absolute), values, holiness, or the sacred, and with how paranormal accounts in the Bible might function in relation to them. Rather, Kvastad's attention is focused exclusively on the paranormal and as a result he sees all three books as sagas, by which he means large, melodramatic stories featuring supernatural beings and paranormal activities. Indeed, he thinks of the Bible as "largely a dialogue between people and supernatural beings, who communicated either in speech or by telepathy, in visions or in dreams" (p. 317). Neither the content of that dialogue, nor even the possible meaning and significance of the mode of communication is mentioned, let alone discussed, in this book.