The cognitive approach changes the way we study the historical past. Most
importantly, when using cognitive models, we start the inquiry with a signifi-
cant amount of additional information at our disposal. For example, instead of
building the portrait of Paul from scratch, we can start out with a template that
contains essential information about a human being’s thoughts, feelings, and
behavior. To be more precise, we have a structural model of how Paul’s
thoughts could be organized, and possible ways his thoughts could be con-
nected to his emotions, experiences, and behavior. If we now take some
concrete piece of information from his epistles and add it to our initial
model, the structural constraints will lead to adjustments in other details of
the picture. Thus cognitive models allow us to use our knowledge of Paul’s
beliefs to make inferences about his religious experiences and social networks in
principled ways. It is of course true that the range of Paul’s thoughts and actions
will show agreements with that of other people in thefirst-century Mediterra-
nean world and differ from the range of thoughts and actions of Swedish
Lutherans in the twenty-first century. The school of social-scientific criticism
rightly emphasized the importance of building cultural models to make sense of
biblical sources (Esler, 1995; Neufeld & DeMaris, 2009). However, cognitive
science can significantly improve the validity of cultural models as it allows us
to understand how cultures work, explaining commonalities and differences
between cultures in systematic ways. Figure 10.1 shows the relationship of
cultural patterns to cross-cultural cognitive structures and individual cognition.
Cognitive models allow us to improve cultural models because cultures are
constrained by maturationally natural cognitive structures. When studying
people at a given location of space and time, we can rely on both cognitive
models and cultural models (Figure 10.2). The fact that culture influences
evolution and thus cognitive models is important for the entire process of
human pre-history (as well as for the future of humankind), but can be safely
ignored in the timeframe we are working with when studying the world of the
New Testament. Further, neither cultures nor individuals are isolated from
each other. The problem of isolating groups has been raised in section 2.2.9.
One way to account for the existence of culturally and historically different
groups without creating discrete entities that do not exist in real life is to think
about groups of people as strongly connected parts of larger social networks.
Finally, the concept of“life history”suggests that the thoughts and feelings of
every individual have been shaped by a set of interactions and experiences that
are unique to that person. Yet these experiences are not randomly thrown into
some empty container that is the individual; rather they are integrated into
pre-existing cognitive structures and interact with other aspects of people’s
lives in a process that can be understood with the help of cognitive models.
Beyond the study of particular individuals, groups, or events in the past, the
text as window also allows us to make sense of historical processes. Scholars
traditionally arranged the writings of the New Testament along some
208 Cognitive Science and the New Testament