bodies and weaponed soldiers before taking an oath during the ceremony
(History of Rome10.38). In this ritual, the initiate probably remembered the
horrific elements, and not other details, such as the oath taken. Experimental
findings about the Spanish version of the firewalking ritual support this
hypothesis (Xygalatas et al., 2013): when interviewed after the ritual,fire-
walkers could recall only very few factual details and most of their memories
were related to their own felt emotions.
Could rituals mentioned in the New Testament provide as strong emotional
stimuli asfirewalking in Spain or (assumedly) the Samnite initiation reported by
Livy? At least one such ritual could have been widespread among thefirst
Christians, that is, the circumcision of non-Jewish male converts. From Paul’s
epistles we learn that some authorities in the Christ movement encouraged and
strongly defended this practice. According to Acts 16:3, Paul circumcised his
helper Timothy, or had him circumcised. The relevant passages of Paul’sepistles
(1 Cor. 7:18–20;Gal.5:2,11–12) yield the overall picture that Paul’sdiscour-
agement of the practice was highly controversial in the communities, which is
the reason he had to use harsh rhetoric to defend his own position. By defending
and spreading the practice of not circumcising converts, Paul created a distance
from mainline Jewish practice and excluded a painful ritual from later Christian
practice. As long as it existed, however, it certainly directed the focus of the
initiate to the brave act itself (just as in thefirewalking ritual), at the expense of
remembering any of the details of the important event.^10
Whereas most rituals mentioned in the New Testament probably did not
function as attention magnets, they could be stressful in many ways. The
concept ofstressgrasps a whole matrix of environmental conditions that affect
the organism (Selye, 1936). The response of the organism to stress is measured
by physiological parameters, particularly changes in the endocrine system
(that is, in the level of hormones in the body), providing quantitative data
that is more difficult to acquire about“emotions”or“arousal.”The latter
might or might not be included in the organism’s response to stress. Stressor
can be either physical, such as heat, cold, pain, or psychological, such as
stressful situations (Lupien et al., 2007; Marin et al., 2011). In human experi-
ments, emotions are normally induced by images or stories of the sort that we
have discussed above, whereas stress is induced by stressful situations, for
example ones involving novelty, uncertainty, or a speaking assignment. How
stress affects memory depends on a number of circumstances, such as the age
and sex of the individual, the hour of the day when stress occurs, the sequential
order of stress and memorization, and the nature of the material to be
remembered. An important and widely supportedfinding is that stress
enhances memory for emotionally laden material, whereas it negatively affects
(^10) That is, if the ritual included anything beyond removing the foreskin.
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