claims of religion. For example, the cognitive theories of god concepts and
religious concepts introduced in this section do not deal with the question as
to whether the gods and spirits really exist. All they claim is that we use the
same mental structures to think about gods and spirits that we also use to
think about more mundane problems. Indeed, cognitive studies of religion do
not usually aim to verify or disprove the ontological claims of religious beliefs,
although they are sometimes invoked in such contexts, both for (e.g., Barrett,
2012) and against (e.g., Dennett, 2006) religion.
1.4 COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE STUDY
OF THE NEW TESTAMENTSince the early 1990s, cognitive approaches to religion have produced a
number of novel and exciting results and hypotheses, which is encouraging
for the cognitive turn in the study of the New Testament. Although the
alliance between the Cognitive Science of Religion and the historical study
of religion is both natural and mutually enriching, the central argument of this
book is that biblical scholars need to develop their own cognitive approach.
Disciplines that embraced the cognitive turn, from literary theory to music-
ology, adapted existing models and research tools as well as developed their
own. For each discipline, there are aspects of human cognition that bear
special significance; thus simply borrowing models from other disciplines is
usually not sufficient for gaining new insights. For example, the psychology of
reading and verbal memory are salient aspects of human cognition that
concern the study of literature; the auditory cortex and the motor system are
arguably more important for studying music from a cognitive perspective.
What does this imply for the study of the New Testament?
Theories in the Cognitive Science of Religion usually address the origins,
long-term survival, and large-scale development of religious phenomena, as
well as the connection of such phenomena to human evolution, brain struc-
tures, and social formations. Can we apply cognitive theories of religion to
study particular historical and textual data on a more detailed level? The
answer is yes, but with qualifications. An explanation of why religion exists
might deal with historical data in general ways, yet it does little to address the
particular historical and philological nuances that historians and philologists
(including scholars of biblical texts) work with. In the past few years, scholars
working on different religious traditions experimented with cognitive theories,
both testing and complementing the existing cognitive toolkit. The study
of the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world has been a particularly
fertile ground for experimentation, including studies of Greek and Roman
A Cognitive Turn 21