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

phenomena, that is, rainfall and earthquake, the occurrence of which is governed by a common pattern. This pattern, in turn, pro ...

In an experiment conducted by Emily Pronin, Daniel M. Wegner, and their collaborators, participants were instructed to perform a ...

Jesper Sørensen (2007) elaborated on the idea of transfer, a concept that was earlier developed by nineteenth-century scholars o ...

parhedros helped him, for example, by calling its name (Scibilia, 2002, pp. 72–5). This attitude to magic is different from the ...

6.4 THE APPEAL OF MIRACLE STORIES In addition to conditioned superstitious behavior and different cognitive mechanisms supportin ...

question tradition and occasionally revise beliefs we learned, there are more general and automatic strategies in place to optim ...

time of the day is unexpected but does not violate innate ontological categor- ies. Healing with saliva (e.g., Mk 7:33) is an in ...

Yet another factor that contributes to the salience of miracle stories in human tradition is their emotional content. As we alre ...

into the role of cultural differences in embracing the counterintuitive—even if we cannot run experiments withfirst century Chri ...

exclude the ability tofly. After all, the everyday interactions of our pre- historical ancestors would have been radically diffe ...

interpretative frameworks available then and now. The question is not so much whether people believe in the“factual”truth of cou ...

rhetoricians around their neck, creating symbolic associations with their voice, eloquence, and intellect; the“belt”(a more appr ...

and belts of Paul could also function in a similar way, especially in the hands of believers who already received the Spirit the ...

7. Religious Experience The study of religious experience in biblical literature has seen ups and downs in the modern history of ...

transfiguration, and the Book of Revelation to illustrate his point and con- cluded that within the early Christian circles, ind ...

concepts and representations come from? Without assigning religious experi- ence a special ontological status (that is, labeling ...

(often processed by different parts of the brain) belong together so we can deal with an apple instead of individual features (s ...

McNamara’s concept of“decentering”(McNamara, 2009, pp. 44–58) also reflects such an understanding of religious experience. Decen ...

which are more likely than not to“differ widely in both cognitive content and corresponding neural correlates”(p. 312). He concl ...

antiquity are based on actual subjective experience or literary imitation and conventions has been discussed for some decades. M ...