This has been on my mind, actually, esp. "a world created as a test where we earn eternal punishment or reward" - and reading of the Bigelsens led me today to reading about "psychic Edgar Cayce (pronounced Casey), who died in 1945 at age 67..."

Cayce, asked about Judas Iscariot, said the soul of Judas, the betrayer of Christ, was at that moment inhabiting the body of a man then alive. "But he said the man (with Judas` soul) was leading a constructive life, and it would have been devastating for him to learn who he once had been."
.... Lynn Sparrow conducts seminars for ARE ... telling us about Cayce, "a very ordinary man with an extraordinary ability." Born in 1877 in a rural part of Kentucky, the son of an uneducated farm couple, he quit school in 9th grade, then held jobs as a bookstore clerk and an insurance salesman, when at age 21 he inexplicably lost his voice. In the struggle to eventually regain it, he would discover that while in a trance, he could diagnose an apparently limitless range of illnesses and prescribe treatment; thousands of people believed themselves to be cured by the methods that Cayce directed.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1987/05/17/the-search-for-past-life/