many contexts, the text is encountered as an oral/aural event. As Risto Uro
(2013b, p. 70) emphasized, the“voice, tone, intonation, gesture, mimicry,
audience acclamation and response and other similar practices”were part of
the listening experience to texts in antiquity. Historically, most readers of the
New Testament participated in such complex sensory experiences, and silent,
solitary reading was mostly for scholarly purposes. This probably remains true
for our age if we consider how people use the New Testament globally. The
complex cognitive processes involved in reading the New Testament in ritual
settings remain to be explored fully (cf. Figure 4.1 in section 4.8 above).
Moreover, the reading of the New Testament is intimately connected to
subjective religious experience. We have seen (section 7.2) that visions and
tours of heaven are shaped by textual traditions; less dramatic forms of
religious experience occurred in various other encounters with the text.
The fact that the New Testament is almost always read in some ritual or
otherwise institutional settings puts constraints on the ways in which readers
canfill in the blanks of the text. However, even if a Bible verse is uttered as part
of the liturgy individual variations are still possible. Apart from the context of
the reading, cultural patterns will guide the reader’s composition of the
message. The role of reading communities in the reading process has been
identified and analyzed by Stanley Fish (1980). Even students attempting very
innovative interpretations of a poem, Fish writes (p. 343), will have an
intuition of which compositions of the text’s message will be acceptable.
Further, interpretations deemed ridiculous in one age can become acclaimed
in another age. To take an example from Biblical Studies, innovative readings
of the New Testament in contemporary exegetical literature almost always
align with cultural trends and political expectations. On the analogy of our
above discussion of“life histories,”we can apply cognitive and cultural models
to the study of readers.
Figure 10.3 shows how cultural and cognitive models can be applied to the
study of the reading process. The application of cognitive science leads to a
better understanding of the range of possible interpretations that emerge
from a given encounter with the text. An important consequence of the
cognitive approach is the recognition that readers are not complete strangers
to the world of the New Testament, since modern readers share cognitive
structures with ancient authors and readers. We are able to learn ancient
Greek and then make sense of much of what we read in the Greek text of
the New Testament because we share basic cognitive patterns with people
in Antiquity. Further, cognitive science helps us account for shared inter-
pretations. First, while social pressure is important for the formation of
reading communities, cultural patterns of interpretation are also constrained
by cognitive structures. Second, there are shared elements of readers’com-
positions of the message not only because of social pressures and shared
cultural background, but also as a consequence of cross-culturally consistent
214 Cognitive Science and the New Testament