transfiguration, and the Book of Revelation to illustrate his point and con-
cluded that within the early Christian circles, individuals had “powerful
revelatory experiences”that they understood as encounters with the glorified
Jesus. While taking into account social scientific studies of religious experience
(particularly by Rodney Stark), Hurtado’s approach comes close to the spirit of
the phenomenological school, inasmuch as he focused on powerful core
experiences that supposedly initiated major changes in religious movements.
Meanwhile, the concept of “Altered States of Consciousness” (ASC)
emerged in psychology to rehabilitate different forms of subjective experience
considered pathological in diagnostic practice. ASC later entered ethnographic
fieldwork, making its way into Biblical Studies in the past two decades (Pilch,
1996, 2011). An important outcome of this research was Pieter Craffert’s study
of Jesus as a shamanicfigure (Craffert, 2008). Although the indiscriminate
use of the category of“shamanism”has been criticized (Bremmer, 2002,
pp. 27–40), identifying cross-cultural patterns is an important step toward a
cognitive neuroscience perspective. Gerd Theissen’s work on the psychological
aspects of earliest Christianity (Theissen, 2007a) considered“extreme”and
“moderate”experience, a heuristic distinction that I will adopt in this chapter.
More recently, the study of religious experience in ancient Judaism and
Christianity has been programmatically embraced by a new section of the
Society of Biblical Literature. The proceedings of the program unit are pub-
lished under the series title“Experientia.”Thefirst volume (Flannery et al.,
2008) offered perspectives on such diverse phenomena as demonic possession,
mediumship, ecstasy, apocalyptic imagery, visions, and related issues in the
New Testament and its ancient literary environment. A second volume
(Shantz & Werline, 2012) followed suit, focusing on the relation between
religious experience and texts. Colleen Shantz’s monograph onPaul’s ecstasy
(Shantz, 2009) already marked a new wave of the study of religious experience
in biblical scholarship, that is, the use of insights from cognitive neuroscience.
Shantz relied particularly on Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili’s theory
of the two ways to mystical experience (see section 7.1) in interpreting
accounts of religious experience in Paul’s writings, which she identified with
“trance,”“ecstasy,”or“altered states of consciousness.”
Although the topic of religious experience has been treated with skepticism
in the Cognitive Science of Religion (mainly due to its connotations in
religious studies; e.g., Pyysiäinen, 2003, pp. 77–142, 2004, pp. 205–18), cog-
nitive theories of religion in fact badly need a systematic approach to religious
experience. Cognitive theories of religion based on cultural epidemiology (that
is, the advantage of minimally counterintuitive religious ideas in cultural
transmission; see sections 1.3 and 2.5) but also theories related to social
functionalism (see especially section 5.3) have difficulties accounting for the
personal, subjective dimension of religion. Where do the religious awe, feel-
ings of wonder, and deep motivational power associated with many religious
142 Cognitive Science and the New Testament