Introduction
Have you ever wondered what happens in your head when you marvel at a
beautiful landscape? How electric and chemical signals generated in the
receptor cells of your eyes travel to the back of your head, and further to the
front, while specialized teams of cells extract information about the shape,
position, color, motion, depth, and other details from the stream of signals?
How you can still“see”the full picture, complete with shapes and shades and
forms and motion, instead of a myriad of fragmented details? How the things
you see call up other things in your memory, making associations and
generating meaning? How the sight is combined further with smells and
sounds and information from other modalities of perception? How subjective
experience is attached to what you see, experience that is only yours and feels
different from place to place and from time to time? How memories of your
perceptions and emotions are stored, preserved, and retrieved? How your
perceptions of the present and memories of the past create your sense of
“self”? Over the last few decades, our knowledge of how the human mind and
brain works increased dramatically. Thefield of cognitive science explores
answers to these kinds of question and it also enables us to understand
religious traditions, rituals, and visionary experiences in novel ways. This
has implications, in turn, for the study of the New Testament and early
Christianity. How people in the ancient Mediterranean world remembered
sayings and stories, what they experienced when participating in rituals, how
they thought about magic and miracle, and how they felt and reasoned about
moral questions—all these can be now better understood with the help of
insights from cognitive science. In this book, I will argue that thefield of New
Testament Studies witnesses the beginning of a cognitive turn.
Cognitive science developed in the 1950s as a reaction to the then fashion-
able behaviorist approach in psychology and gradually made its way into
many academic disciplines, transforming them as well as being enriched and
enhanced by the very samefields it permeated. The“cognitive turn,”as it is
usually called, has brought about fundamental shifts in disciplines such
as linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and ethology, but it
has also shaped literary studies, musicology, anthropology, sociology, and