1. A Cognitive Turn
Students call him the“Neanderthal Jesus.”He has dark and woolly hair and
beard, strong eyebrows, full lips, his skin is sunburnt and wrinkled, and his
round, brown eyes look at you with a somewhat naïve and startled expression.
When I teach about the historical Jesus, I like to show this image alongside a
victorious, blond, and beautiful Northern European Jesus, standing in front of
the empty tomb, as depicted by the Danish painter Carl Christian Hansen
(1804–80). The image of the“Neanderthal Jesus,”however, was not born of
artistic imagination. This picture, which wasfirst shown in the BBC series
entitled“Son of God”(2001), has been created with the help of forensic facial
reconstruction methods, based on skulls found in the neighborhood of ancient
Jerusalem. Granted, the image does not show the face of the historical Jesus: it
shows what Jesus could look like if his face was sufficiently similar to the
average appearance of his Judean contemporaries. Thus the picture also
informs us about the probable appearance of Jesus’disciples, and that of
John the Baptist.
If science enables the creation of three-dimensional portraits of long-dead
people based on archeologicalfinds, could we go beyond outward appearance
and use scientific methods to say something about the inner world of the
members of the Jesus movement? Can we draw the psychological portrait of
the ancient people who created, transmitted, and used the traditions of
the New Testament and other early Christian sources? Inspired by recent
advances in a number of relevantfields of research, the purpose of this book is
to explore how cognitive science can help us achieve that goal. The influence of
cognitive science on psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and other academ-
ic disciplines is often called the“cognitive turn.”The central argument of this
book is that a cognitive turn in the study of New Testament and early
Christian literature is underway and opens new perspectives for the under-
standing of the history, texts, and religion of the Christ followers as well as
offering fresh insights about classical problems of Biblical Studies.
What is cognitive science? A short, textbook definition tells us that cognitive
science is the“scientific interdisciplinary study of the mind”(Friedenberg &
Silverman, 2006, p. 2). The beginnings of cognitive science reach back to the