significance of social, economic, and political processes can be denied, both
types of explanations of Christian origins run into fundamental problems.
With regard to the influence of greatfigures, the next question to be asked is
why someone made a particular decision (for example, to support Christians
rather than persecute them). Explanations invoking impersonal forces pose a
different challenge. Economic hardships and political turmoil can certainly
lead to shifts in history, but it is not easy to see why they would cause changes
in religious beliefs and practices, in particular—unless masses of people are
converted forcefully. With regard to both kinds of explanations, we can ask the
question of whether religious change can be explained only by external factors
or there are mechanisms intrinsic to religion that can bring about such change.
Above I indicated how cognitive models can inform cultural models, and
how cognitive and cultural models together can be used to reconstruct facts
about individuals and groups in the historical past. This method can be
extended to the study of historical change, as well. The cognitive approaches
outlined in this book can be used to build cognitive models specific to religion,
which, in turn, help us explain how religious change occurs. For example,
Risto Uro (2016, pp. 85–7) drew on the Ritual Form Theory to suggest that
John’s baptism transformed a periodic ritual washing into a special-agent
ritual (probably performed only once on each patient), with implications for
various (cognitive, social, emotional) aspects of the ritual. The model of
minimal counterintuitiveness has been used to explain why the image of the
resurrected Jesus presented in the synoptic gospels and 1 Corinthians 15:3– 8
became widely accepted (Czachesz, 2007b, 2007c and section 2.5). The social
dynamics of the Corinthian congregation as known from Paul’s epistles has
been studied in terms of the complex interactions of beliefs, experience, and
rituals (Czachesz, 2012a and section 7.4). Finally, the formation of the canon
has been illuminated with reference to selective processes in cultural trans-
mission (Czachesz & Theissen, 2016a, 2016b). In all of these examples,
historical changes in religious beliefs and practices are explained by inherent
features of cognitive models of religion rather than with reference to excep-
tional genius or the postulated influences of external events. This does not
mean, however, that the cognitive approach isolates religion from the rest of
culture; the interaction between religious change and other cultural processes
can be addressed with the help of more general cognitive and cultural models,
as indicated in Figure 10.2.
The text as a window also allows a glimpse into transcendent realities as
perceived by thefirst Christians. Is a cognitive approach not orthogonal to any
such reading of the text? I would like to distinguish two meanings (or groups
of meanings) of the concept of transcendence and show how the cognitive
approach brings valuable, new insights to their discussion. First, by something
transcendent people often mean something“divine.”Many contributions to
the Cognitive Science of Religion revolved around the concept of the divine
210 Cognitive Science and the New Testament