historiography. In religious studies, a newfield calledCognitive Science of
Religionemerged from the 1990s. This book makes a case for a corresponding
cognitive turn in New Testament Studies (and by extension in thefield
of Biblical Studies), both surveying relevant developments in the Cognitive
Science of Religion and digging into thefield of cognitive and behavioral
sciences in search of opportunities of gaining new insights about biblical
materials.
Why should biblical scholars bother with learning about the cognitive
approach? After all, hermeneutical trends come and go, and it is not unusual
for biblical scholars to cooperate only with small groups of like-minded
colleagues without learning much about other approaches. As I will argue in
thefinal chapter of this book (Chapter 10), the cognitive approach is unlike
other methodologies insofar as it is neither an additional step of interpretation
to be performed after we are done with all traditional methods nor a new
technique that replaces one or another traditional method in the exegetical
toolkit. On the contrary, the cognitive approach is not a new method at all: the
cognitive turn has the potential of shedding new light on many, if not all,
traditional questions of the methodology of biblical interpretation. Nothing
we have done before has to be given up but much can be potentially gained by
taking the cognitive stance in virtually every question. The full repertoire of
cognitive methods in textual and historical studies still remains to be crafted.
The chapters of this book present some methodological tools and initial steps
for, together with a large number of examples of, applying the cognitive
approach to the New Testament and related ancient literature.
The beginnings of the use of cognitive science in the study of the New
Testament reach back tofirst decade of the twenty-first century. In an article
entitled“The Gospels and Cognitive Science”(Czachesz, 2003, pp. 35–6),
I identified four areas in which cognitive science can enhance our knowledge
of the New Testament: (a) the question of the forms and genres of early
Christian literature; (b) the interaction of orality and literacy; (c) bilingualism
(such as combinations of Greek, Aramaic, Latin, and Coptic in early Christian
populations); and (d) the connection of early Christian thought to the social
and ritual components of the movement. Meanwhile, Luther H. Martin
pioneered the use of the theories and models of the Cognitive Science of
Religion in the study ancient religions (Martin, 2003) and early Christianity
(Martin, 2007). In another study (Czachesz, 2007e), I proposed a naturalistic
approach to Christian origins that combined cognitive science with system
theory, network science, and computer modeling, addressing the domains of
beliefs, religious experience, rituals, artifacts, and social networks. Other
publications applied cognitive theories in specific areas of biblical literature
(cf. Czachesz, 2008a), such as rituals (Uro, 2007, 2010, 2011a), textual trans-
mission (Czachesz, 2007g, 2009b), magic (Czachesz, 2007d, 2011a), religious
experience (Shantz, 2009), social organization (Czachesz, 2008b, 2011c), and
2 Cognitive Science and the New Testament