indicate. In sum, scripts provide a memory structure, a summary of old
experiences in terms of which new experience can be encoded into memory.
“Thinking”about events means that we try tofind the most appropriate script
to use. A textbook example of script theory is the restaurant script (Schank &
Abelson, 1977, pp. 42–6; Scott & Nicholson, 1991, pp. 89–100):
1 actor goes to restaurant;
2 actor is seated;
3 actor orders meal from waiter;
4 waiter brings meal to actor;
5 actor eats meal;
6 actor gives money to waiter;
7 actor leaves restaurant.When we enter a restaurant or hear information that can be easily connect-
ed to a restaurant visit, the restaurant script is evoked. We will then have no
difficulty, for example,finding out how to get food from the waiter or
understanding why someone paid in the end. Finally, scripts in our minds
are notfixed forever: new information can modify the relevant script. How-
ever, we prefer to avoid having to revise our scripts, because even minor
changes in our memories might require us to reconfigure many other parts
of our knowledge, involving “effortful cognitive operations” (Schank &
Abelson, 1995, p. 17). As a consequence, we tend to preserve our scripts and
accommodate new information to them, rather than the other way around—as
demonstrated by Bartlett’s observation about modifications to“The War of
the Ghosts”during recall.
Let us see how script theory sheds light on the transmission of biblical
narratives (cf. Czachesz, 2003). Elizabeth Minchin (2001) elaborated on
the results of the “oral formulaic school,” especially stemming from the
ethnography of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, who studied bards per-
forming epic folk narratives in the Balkans in thefirst half of the twentieth
century, and described“typical scenes”or“themes”in Homeric literature.
Parry and Lord thought typical scenes were learned by the singers so that they
might reproduce an action sequence in song with relative ease: for example,
the harnessing of horses, the preparation of a meal, the making of a bed, or the
procedures of dressing. Minchin suggested, in contrast, that typical scenes—
which Lord thought an apprentice singer would memorize on purpose, as part
of an educational process—may be in fact scripts that encapsulate a“stand-
ardized record of routine activities and which the singer to be, like anyone else,
will have learned early in his life”(Minchin, 2001, p. 15). A story is created
when typical scenes are linked into a narrative that is always based on a causal
chain. The act of storytelling itself follows conventions, which Minchin also
describes as a script (p. 19). Minchin describes in detail the“contest script”
and its variations in Homer. While Minchin’s innovative use of script theory
70 Cognitive Science and the New Testament