Testament came into being in the context of religious practice. Our materials
(including literary sources and archeological data) offer opportunities to
address the (trans)formation of episodic memories in rituals, as well as the
interaction between memories and subjective religious experience. In subse-
quent chapters we will discuss such examples.
(3) The main argument of this chapter was that cognitive science offers new
perspectives on the textual transmission of the New Testament. How stories,
sayings, and larger pieces of texts are remembered can be studied from the
perspective of cognitive processes, such as chunking to overcome the limita-
tions of working memory, the use of schemata (in particular, scripts), the effect
of local cuing in serial recall, as well as the influence of counterintuitiveness
and emotions on the preservation of some tradition. I have also argued that
these observations can be applied (mutatis mutandis) to early Christian
literacy, due to the heavy reliance on memory in ancient literate production.
Case studies demonstrated the fruitfulness of the approach, for example, in
interpreting passion and martyrdom narratives in the canonical and apoc-
ryphal gospels and the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (Czachesz, 2007f,
2010b), analyzing the Matthean composition of the Sermon on the Mount
(Uro, 2011c), or explaining the success of early Christianity (Czachesz, 2011b;
Czachesz & Lisdorf, 2013). Cognitive science can also shed new light on the
synoptic problem. Eric Eve (2015) relied on Rubin’s model of serial recall to
evaluate the relationship between Lukan and Matthean traditions. In this
context, it is important to note that the cognitive approach does not imply a
wholesale rejection of written sources; however, it encourages us to rethink
some of the assumptions behind the two-source theory and redaction criti-
cism. For example, we have seen that variations across traditions naturally
arise due to memory effects without conscious editorial manipulation.
Further, we have seen that literary composition was partly oral/aural, giving
room to memory processes shaping the text. The latter observation must
warn us that identifying oral compositional elements in a passage does not
yet prove that the author took it from an oral source. In sum, the cognitive
neuroscientific study of memory provides incentives to re-evaluate classical
problems and their traditional solutions in the composition of the New
Testament, especially when used in combination with other historical and
philological insights.
Memory and Transmission 87