Preface
This book invites a cross-disciplinary journey through three academic worlds:
the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. As it appears, many if not
most academics are intrigued by the idea of cooperating with colleagues from
other disciplines. In my experience, however, cooperation between substan-
tially differentfields often hits almost impenetrable walls. It is not only the lack
of shared language and familiarity with each other’s methodology that chal-
lenges even the most dedicated academic adventurers. There are different
styles of thinking, different expectations as to what it means to“know”
something, and indeed, often there are completely different identities shaped
by decades of different cultural exposure. It is quite possible that my colleagues
in physics and I spent our formative years undertaking different kinds of
intellectual exercises, reading different books, and being excited about differ-
ent movies. Competition and political struggles in academia often exacerbate
such divides. In this study, I would like to convince the reader that learning
about the New Testament through the lens of cognitive science is rewarding
because it leads us to new solutions for old problems and prompts us to ask
new questions about our textual and material evidence.
In the second half of the 1990s, cognitive psychologists at Eötvös Loránt
University in Budapest were kind enough to take my interest in cognitive
science seriously, feed me with readings, and invite me to contribute to a
workshop on collective memory, held at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the
Hungarian Psychological Society. I am especially thankful to Csaba Pléh and
Anikó Kónya. The next important influence came from the School of Behav-
ioral and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Groningen, where
during the early 2000s, while holding a postdoctoral grant of the Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific Research, I was able to attend various workshops
and activities, including seminars on the philosophy of mind, memory,
epigenetic inheritance, neuroimaging technologies, and other fascinating
subjects. My pursuits of a cognitive approach to early Christianity were
fundamentally shaped by a third group of academics, who pioneered the
field that is known as the Cognitive Science of Religion. It was a pleasant
surprise to meet a group of like-minded scholars of religion, and discover that
some issues I was tackling in the context of the New Testament and early
Christianity had already been studied in the context of other religious and
cultural traditions. I would like to thank especially Pascal Boyer, Joseph
Bulbulia, Stewart Guthrie, E. Thomas Lawson, Luther Martin, Robert
N. McCauley, Ilkka Pyysiäinen, Harvey Whitehouse, and Don Wiebe.