of different types of writings. The formation of monasteries, the emergence of
the Rabbinical tradition with its own techniques of transmission, as well as
liturgical and artistic uses of the text presented criteria for selection. A great
deal of ancient Jewish and Christian texts faded into oblivion and perished,
while some texts are known to us only from fortuitous discoveries. The
changing fortunes of different communities certainly played an important
role, which resulted in processes we could call“memetic drift”rather than a
memetic version of natural selection (cf. section 2.1).
Let us now shift our attention from the level of the replicator to the level of
the organism, that is, the human populations using the New Testament. It is
beyond doubt that the text of Bible exerted an influence on the lives of
religious communities. The text of the New Testament has been used as a
recipe constantly, including the period of its writing and compilation. This
understanding of the effect of the Bible gives new meaning to the idea of the
history of Christianity as the history of biblical interpretation, as suggested by
Gerhard Ebeling (1947) and later by Karlfried Froehlich (1978). At the same
time, however, the evolutionary and cognitive understanding of the Bible as
replicator also corrects the strongly Protestant bias in the proposed model.
The Bible as replicator (see Table 10.1) is always embedded into a hermen-
eutical tradition and an institutional framework that translates its text into
behavior. The very same Bible verse can motivate people to very different
kinds of actions if read in different contexts and in different ways. Does this
take us back to the model of the text as mirror? Not necessarily. The selective
reading of the Bible by every community using it and the different hermen-
eutics of translating it into action can be understood on the analogy of the
DNA. As we discussed above (in section 2.3), based on the same DNA, cells
produce different proteins depending on a variety of circumstances. Some
genes are never translated into proteins; some are silenced or activated due to
the position of the cell in the body, inherited epigenetic factors, or various
environmental circumstances. The selective use of the biblical text and the
varying interpretations of different groups of Bible readers are analogous to
the composition of the DNA and the role of epigenetics. Traditions of
interpretation can be seen on the analogy of epigenetic inheritance.
The model described in this section is not just a new way of saying“history
of reception.”Whereas reception puts the emphasis on the varying ways different
populations read the text, the model of the Bible as replicator emphasizes the
Table 10.1.The Bible as replicator
DNA BibleSource of information Coding DNA Texts
Mediating factors RNA, translation mechanisms Readers, community
Modulating factors Epigenetic markers Hermeneutical traditions
218 Cognitive Science and the New Testament