Cognitive Science and the New Testament A New Approach to Early Christian Research

know-how to the local population—a type of religion that has been described at several locations in the Pacific region since the ...

system of beliefs (doctrines), such as exemplified by the ambiguities about resurrection (1 Cor. 15) and a variety of ethical qu ...

of episodic and semantic memory, it has been suggested that rituals can impact participants’minds in a variety of ways (Czachesz ...

bodies and weaponed soldiers before taking an oath during the ceremony (History of Rome10.38). In this ritual, the initiate prob ...

memory for emotionally neutral material (Lupien et al., 2007, p. 222). We have seen above that memory for all details was better ...

Testament, there are various indications that they were highly esteemed among some of thefirst Christians (cf. Vaage & Wimbu ...

Romans 6:1–11. The addition of such explanations to the ritual could strengthen existing memories of already baptized members an ...

(1965)), any“native”participant of a ritual will be able to judge whether a certain action is a ritual or not (McCauley & La ...

marriage arespecial-agent rituals, in which the agent of the ritual is connected to the deity more directly than the patient of ...

necessarily seen as super-permanent: sick people could get better temporarily but eventually relapse and even die, which would t ...

the transubstantiation and the distribution are connected with each other. Is the former perhaps an enabling ritual needed so th ...

ritual actions”(Sørensen, 2005, p. 178). As we have seen on the example of the Eucharist, the very same event can be analyzed as ...

rituals in certain religious traditions that possess such as concept. However, since we agreed to use multiple understandings of ...

some features of rituals on the memories of the participants. Again, using the Modes Theory allowed us to move beyond discussing ...

6. Magic and Miracle Was Jesus a magician?^1 Were the apostles magicians? How one answers these questions depends to large exten ...

developed stage. Once established by these scholars, the dichotomy of religion and magic has underlain the work of generations o ...

categories and concepts of his or her own culture—the two words originally derived from the linguistic concepts of phonemicand p ...

count as magic, by our definition. Yet we cannot exclude a strictly magical understanding of baptism, such as a protective measu ...

earn scores on the counter if they do something. Scores appeared on the counter either at regular or random intervals, but witho ...

example of faith in James 5:18. Choni the Circle-Drawer was a famous rainmaker in thefirst centuryBCE(Mishnah Taanit 3:8) and pr ...