perplexing than that of religion. With regard to religion, there are some basic
aspects that most theorists tend to include in their respective definitions with
some variation, such as breaches of everyday reality, as reflected by the notions
of“sacred,”“supernatural,”or“superhuman.”In contrast, perhaps the only
thing most theorists seem to agree on about rituals is that rituals involve some
kind of repetition.^1 This is, however, a truism that hardly helps us any further,
since most things we do in life we do more than once. Things called“ritual”in
scholarship as well as in everyday parlance can be embedded in religious
institutions but this is not necessary; they can involve supernatural or super-
human concepts, but this is not required, either. In the cultural world of the
New Testament, hardly any aspect of life was immune to the influence of
superhuman agents, such as gods and spirits. Nevertheless, one can argue that
some activities in the New Testament world are better candidates to be rituals
than others, both when considered through the eyes of ancient people and as
understood by modern interpreters. For example, Paul’s discussion of the
Eucharist in 1 Corinthians 11 can be understood as an attempt to make the
shared meals of the Corinthian congregation more like a ritual and less like
any other meal. Without analyzing this example in much detail at this point,
we can note that in Paul’s view, the ritual should be unlike the meals people
consume in their homes (v. 22), its connection to the myth of Christ should be
made explicit (vv. 23–26), and some non-trivial consequences of consuming
the meal should be kept in mind (vv. 28–30). In the remainder of this chapter,
I will follow up on some of these casual observations in the framework of
cognitive ritual theories.
The variety of definitions of ritual led to the criticism that scholars define
ritual as itfits their purposes of exercising power at any given place and time
(Uro, 2016, pp. 28–9). I suggest that in this chapter we use the diversity of
approaches in ritual studies to highlight different aspects of rituals. In partic-
ular, I will considerfive ways of understanding rituals (loosely based on Bell,
2005, 2009, pp. 93–137; Zuesse, 2005), with special attention to cognitive theo-
ries, and suggest how we can apply these approaches to enhance our unders-
tanding of the New Testament. Rituals have been divided into groups in many
ways previously. It needs to be emphasized that the structure of this chapter
does not represent yet another attempt at a typology of rituals. Instead, I am
asking what certain types of (cognitive) approaches emphasize about rituals and
assume that the same ritual can be studied from the perspective of more than
one approach.
Before starting our review, it is important to ask the question of how the
written text of the New Testament can reveal anything about the ritual
practices of the people who are mentioned in the texts or who composed,
(^1) In his discussion of recent theories of rituals, Ronald Grimes (2014, pp. 194, 267) seems to
confirm this impression. The fact that there are once-in-a-lifetime rituals (p. 325), does not mean
that such rituals are not repeated.
Ritual 89