How did such tendencies impact the formation of the Jesus movement?
First of all, it is unlikely that everybody followed the above-mentioned ideals.
Certainly many Jesus believers had normal families and maintained normal
social bonds (cf. Theissen, 2004; Gemünden et al., 2013). What happened to
the people whose relationships changed as indicated by some of the texts?
We cannot simply switch off mechanisms of the human mind that support
our social connections; we cannot help remembering faces and storing
information about people whom we meet. People who did not maintain
contacts within their families, neighborhoods, and villages, used their cog-
nitive relationship system to build social ties elsewhere. The letters of Paul,
for example, show that he had an extended network of social relationships in
different cities across the Eastern Mediterranean. The more people moved
around, however, the less time and energy they were able to invest into every
single social tie. In other words, they had many of the relationships that
sociologist Mark Granovetter calledweak social ties(Granovetter, 1973,
1983; see section 9.2).
We can conclude this section by observing that the cross-cultural, evolved
foundations of morality involve much more than a general-purpose empathy
modulated by cultural convention. We can expect multiple cognitive systems
of social interaction to govern moral intuitions in different ways. For example,
we can interpret social rivalry as social interaction governed by the status
system, rather than as a relationship in which empathy fails. Both Paul and
Jesus (according to the gospels) maintained agonistic relationships with their
rivals, which they did not consider as a breech of moral standards. In terms of
the foregoing discussion, we can say that these agonistic interactions did not
result from personal grudge or the lack of empathy toward strangers or out-
group. The nature of such behavior was dictated by the status-system, acti-
vated by the context and mode of the interaction with their peers.^4
8.3 MORALITY FROM RELIGIONIn addition to inclusivefitness and reciprocal altruism, there is yet another
way to account for the survival of altruistic traits. The model ofgroup selection,
which we already discussed in section 2.1, suggests that some genes can
contribute traits that are neutral or even disadvantageous for the reproductive
success of the individual, yet get transmitted because they benefit the group
that the individual is a member of. David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson
developed the theory of multi-level selection, where competition between
(^4) The cultural anthropological model of challenge and response (Malina, 2001, pp. 33–8)
deals with this behavioral pattern as manifested in Greco-Roman society.
Morality 177