2.1 The Great Divide between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences Is Diminishing

The emergence of cognitive approaches in Religious Studies can be situated in the larger context of the deep-rooted conflict between the sciences and the humanities, or between ‘the two cultures’, to use C. P. Snow's well-known formulation of the issue.Footnote ¹¹ This great divide has been described in terms of such dichotomies as explanation/interpretation, biology/culture, nature/nurture, determination/freedom, and so on. One description which is often repeated is that humanists study ‘texts’ (in the broad sense that this term is often understood today), which are best approached from the interpretative perspective, whereas scientists study ‘things’, governed by deterministic laws.Footnote ¹² Since biblical scholars have always been intrinsically in the business of interpreting texts, it is understandable they have aligned themselves firmly with the humanities camp, without paying much attention to various attempts at ‘vertical integration’Footnote ¹³ or ‘consilience’, a term that has come to be associated with the unity of human knowledge at least since Edward O. Wilson's famous work, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).Footnote ¹⁴ More recently, however, new models have been advanced for collaboration between the sciences and the humanities, which could be of more interest to biblical scholars. For example, in their introduction to the excellent collection of essays on the consilience approach,Footnote ¹⁵ the Canadian scholars Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard are very explicit on the point that the ‘second wave consilience’ they advocate is different from the earlier model represented by Wilson. According to Slingerland and Collard, ‘first wave consilience’ aimed at ‘bringing the study of humanistic issues into the same framework as the study of non-human species and non-biotic phenomena’. Against such an approach, they argue that

CSR can be seen as operating largely within this new, shared framework. To be sure, the field has rightly been defined as being about ‘sciencing up’ the academic study of religion.Footnote ¹⁷ But cognitive scholars of religion do not usually aim at a simplistic reduction of cultural and religious matters to domains of natural sciences (such as biology or neuroscience). Rather, they have developed a number of ideas and models that give priority to an interactionist approach over the ‘science-engulfing-the-humanities’ approach criticised by Slingerland and Collard. These include Lawson and McCauley's emphasis that explanation and interpretation are mutually complementary,Footnote ¹⁸ and the notion of ‘explanatory pluralism’, advocated for example by McCauley and Pyysiäinen;Footnote ¹⁹ the latter term refers roughly to non-reductive cross-fertilisation between levels of analyses, such as the social and the psychological level. It should also be noted that many cognitive scholars of religion come from different fields of social, historical and theological studies, bringing with them a range of traditional methods and approaches that they continue to apply along with cognitive approaches.Footnote ²⁰ As István Czachesz has pointed out, the cognitive approach to Biblical Studies is not actually a new method at all, but ‘the cognitive turn has the potential of shedding new light on many, if not all, traditional questions of the methodology of biblical interpretation’.Footnote ²¹

2.2 The Social/Cultural Level Is No Longer Seen as the Only Legitimate Level of Explanation or Interpretation

Popular models for explaining early Christianity, and religious phenomena in general, have long been anchored in social theory and in various culturalist approaches. In the above-mentioned overview, Alles writes about ‘an anthropological turn’, referring to the impact on the study of religion, beginning in the 1960s, of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner and others.Footnote ²² Something similar happened in New Testament Studies with the emergence of social science approaches in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ²³ While various post-modern, post-structural, post-colonial, feminist and other post- approaches have made it difficult to describe the history of research with reference to just a few dominant schemes, it can be argued that the foregrounding of socio-cultural factors in the interpretation of New Testament (or cognate) texts has been one major mode in which the work of our guild has operated during the last decades. Whether this takes the form of explicit use of social-scientific concepts and models, or more inductively of focusing on the social realia of the New Testament world,Footnote ²⁴ the level of the social and cultural – embracing social institutions, economics, social strata, cultural values, rhetoric etc. – has now been a major interpretative framework in New Testament scholarship for several decades.

Currently, however, this pattern is shifting towards approaches that blur the traditional ‘hierarchy’ of the sciences. One indication of this shift is that Social-Scientific Criticism, a sub-field promoting the explicit use of sociological and anthropological models, has broadened to encompass social-psychological approaches and models, in particular Social Identity Theory (SIT).Footnote ²⁵ There are obvious cognitive aspects in SITFootnote ²⁶ that bridge the gap between the social and cognitive sciences. This new interest in approaches integrating social and cognitive research is not a separate phenomenon, but can be seen as part of a much larger trend of grounding the social sciences in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences.Footnote ²⁷

The pioneering work in CSR (recall the ‘standard’ model introduced above) was a strong call to consider the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious cultures, thus providing a necessary corrective to the ‘mind-blindness’ that has haunted the social sciences.Footnote ²⁸ More recently, however, CSR has developed into a pluralistic field, accommodating diverse approaches and often emphasising ‘two-way interaction’ between the socio-cultural domain and that of cognition.Footnote ²⁹ It is crucial for New Testament scholars to be familiar with these developments in the study of religion, since much of the work in interpreting New Testament texts in their cultural contexts assumes a one-way interaction, prioritising the influence of society or culture on individual cognition. Careful analysis of these cultural and social contexts is of the utmost importance for interpreting the New Testament, but such analysis should not be based on the assumption that the only causative chain is from the level of the social and cultural to individual cognition, and not vice versa.

2.3 Cognitive Approaches Allow a Responsible Method for Comparison

Cross-cultural comparison has been and is a key issue in the study of religion, and much ink has been spilt over the topic. Among post-modern scholars, comparativism has been treated with a considerable amount of scepticism;Footnote ³⁰ but the bottom line, as William Paden puts it, is that ‘there is no study of religion without cross-cultural categories, analysis, and perspective’:

Hence, comparativism is – or at least should be – a key issue in the study of the New Testament as well, and by extension in the study of early Christianity. Räisänen's vigorous defence of ‘fair play’ in the study of early Christian religion reflects several aspects of the issue, such as the notoriously negative view of Judaism held by past generations of biblical scholars and the one-sided focus on the canonical texts, overlooking extant non-canonical writings. The notion of fair comparison arose with Räisänen's early work on the Qur'an in the 1970s, and later inspired several research projects on extra-canonical writings and ‘heretical’ authors.Footnote ³²

Comparativism is an unavoidable but thorny path. How does cognitive science help New Testament scholars practise comparison in a responsible way? Among those who have explicitly theorised comparativism in our field are the scholars who promote the use of social science models – so let me again take Social-Scientific Criticism as an example. These scholars use ‘cross-cultural models’, such as the ‘generic model of honour-shame’, as a guide to reading texts in the New Testament.Footnote ³³ The key problem for advocates of social-scientific ‘modelling’ is the cultural distance between the ancient biblical world and the modern Western interpreter. Using insights and models from cultural anthropology, especially from a sub-field called Mediterranean anthropology,Footnote ³⁴ is the best way for the interpreter to avoid ethnocentric and anachronistic readings of New Testament texts. In this approach, the comparison is between two broad cultural constructs: on the one side the ancient Mediterranean world, dominated by collectivist and honour-driven values, on the other the modern world of individualism. The emphasis is on differences.

As we know, the model-centred approach has aroused fierce scholarly debate as to the role of models in exploring the social and cultural world of Christianity. Wayne Meeks, for example, in his 2004 presidential paper to the SNTS, referred to this debate in his comment about ‘some’ who, having faced ‘the sheer limits of data in our sources’, were tempted to replace ‘the inductive testing of hypotheses’ with a ‘deductive use of sociological or anthropological theory’.Footnote ³⁵ This kind of criticism is not as self-evident as it might seem at first sight. For one thing, the inductive–deductive dichotomy is not very illuminating. Scholars can work inductively or deductively, and still achieve relevant knowledge by hypothesis-testing.Footnote ³⁶ Moreover, a theory-driven approach does not mean ‘filling in the gaps’ in our evidence, since models, theories and concepts are tools for selecting, organising and categorising data as well as making connections between data – not for creating new data.Footnote ³⁷ We cannot help but theorise one way or another.

This does not mean that the approach emphasising the ‘otherness’ of the New Testament world should not be supplemented with theories and approaches that are amenable to dealing with the undeniable similarities between us and the people in the New Testament world. The human brain and its basic mental functions have not changed in any significant way over the last two millennia.Footnote ³⁸ There is no a priori reason to assume that we will reach the best understanding of the New Testament and its world by focusing merely on the differences between the ancient/Mediterranean world and modern/Western values and behavioural patterns. Cognitive and evolutionary approaches to religion can be helpful in counterbalancing a one-sided emphasis on the ‘strangeness’ of the world of early Christians by offering tools for analysing early Christian texts, beliefs, rituals etc. as results of human behaviour. Zooming out to generic types of human behaviour is useful because it opens the door for cross-cultural comparisons that go beyond dichotomous (or unduly sharp) contrasts between different cultural ‘worlds’ – whether inspired by Social-Scientific Criticism or by post-modernism.

It is this cross-cultural perspective offered by cognitive science that opens up new possibilities for the study of the New Testament, and by extension for the study of early Christianity. These do not have to lead to abandoning our task as historians of ancient texts and cultures for an essentially ahistorical approach, one that would give pride of place to generic human predispositions and ignore cultural variation or historical particulars. Rather, my argument is that cognitive science can provide us with theories, frameworks and tools that can contribute to historical and cultural analyses.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, an entire new sub-field has developed, that of cognitive historiography, which is gaining currency among archaeologists, classicists, historians of ancient religions, early Christian scholars, and others.Footnote ⁴⁰

How might cognitive historiography work in the study of the New Testament? In the rest of my paper, I attempt to illustrate this by means of a concrete example.

3.1 An Analysis of the Formal Characteristics of John's Baptism Helps to Bring the Innovative Nature of John's Immersion Ritual to the Fore

Although scholars often recognise the difference between John's rite and other contemporary Jewish water purifications, they seldom emphasise the fact that the immersion practice instigated by John involved both ritual agent and ritual patient.Footnote ⁵¹ Jewish ritual washing was a self-administered action, and its ritual structure was thus quite different from that of John's immersion. The innovative nature of John's rite becomes palpable when we apply the cognitive theory of ritual developed by Lawson and McCauley.Footnote ⁵² This theory, referred to variably as Ritual Form Theory or Ritual Competence Theory, focuses on the formal characteristics of rituals as actions in which ritual agents perform actions upon ritual patients, often by means of instruments. Lawson and McCauley argue that people universally construe rituals as ordinary actions, with the exception that in religious rituals ‘culturally postulated superhuman agents’ are evoked. The important point for our discussion is that Lawson and McCauley offer a framework for the cross-cultural analysis of ritual actions that goes beyond the functions and meanings that rituals serve in particular cultural and institutional settings. Their bold claim is that there are ‘ritual intuitions’ which, if not universal, are frequent enough to allow relevant inferences from people's behaviour across cultures.

The most interesting of these ‘ritual intuitions’ suggested by Lawson and McCauley is the hypothesis that people generally regard those rituals in which it is the agent of the ritual that is closely associated with superhuman agents as being more powerful than those in which superhuman agents are associated with the instrument or patient of the ritual. To use Lawson and McCauley's own technical terminology, the hypothesis argues that ‘special agent rituals’ are more powerful than ‘special instrument rituals’ or ‘special patient rituals’.Footnote ⁵³ Think for example of a shamanic healing ritual, as compared to a sacrifice to one's ancestors. In the former it is the agent, the shaman, who offers a connection to the world of superhuman agents, while in the latter it is the patients, i.e. the ancestors, who have the closest relationship with the superhuman world. According to Lawson and McCauley's hypothesis, a shamanic ritual would be generally perceived as more powerful and efficacious than a sacrifice to ancestors – which, I think, would be largely confirmed.

Thus, the cognitive theory of ritual advanced by Lawson and McCauley provides us with analytical concepts with which to tackle the issue of what was new in John's ritual washing. John turned the Jewish self-administered water ritual into a special agent ritual, in which an agent, a god-sent prophet (Luke/Q 7.26) or someone authorised by him (cf. John 4.1–2), immerses a ritual patient (i.e. the baptisand). This innovation had an impact on the religious practices of John's contemporaries that reached beyond his own followers, and his rite was copied by adherents of the Jesus movement as a central entrance rite.

The cognitive approach not only offers analytical concepts to describe John's ritual invention; it also opens up avenues for analysing the role of ritual innovations in the rise of religious movements more generally.Footnote ⁵⁴ The group of adherents attracted by John is an excellent example of a movement in which a ritual creation plays a key role in motivating and mobilising followers. My favourite point of comparison is Amma or Ammachi (‘Mother’), the most renowned female guru in present-day India.Footnote ⁵⁵ Known as a ‘hugging saint’, she shares a number of features with John the Baptist. The trademark of both religious leaders is the performance of a new ritual. Their ritual innovations are based on the traditional practices of their cultures (Jewish ritual washing, the traditional Hindu darshan),Footnote ⁵⁶ yet they are distinctively new creations. We can also safely argue that the ritual entrepreneurship of both leaders is a crucial factor in the success of their respective movements.

3.2 Cognitive Theory Is Helpful in Evaluating Historical Interpretations

Cognitive theory is also useful in evaluating interpretations that historians of early Judaism and early Christianity have proposed with regard to John's immersion. As I have noted, scholars have not usually paid much attention to the formal differences between Jewish ritual washings and the rite promoted by John. The failure to recognise the most obvious feature of John's practice has entailed readings which overlook the decisive role that John's ritual innovation played in the formation of the movement. For example, Joan Taylor, who has written an extensive and in many respects helpful analysis of John's immersion, misses precisely this point.Footnote ⁵⁷ Taylor rightly points out that John's water ritual must be interpreted in the light of the purification practices of Second Temple Judaism.Footnote ⁵⁸ In her discussion of the issue of what was ‘novel and extraordinary’ in John's ritual practice, however, she sees this as having to do with the ethical prerequisites for participation that John set. The ‘novelty’ of John, in other words, lay not so much in his immersion practice as in his teaching: that ‘previous immersions and ablutions were ineffective for Jews without the practice of true righteousness’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Such an interpretation leaves us with some nagging questions. First of all, why did people want to be immersed by John or someone authorised by him? Why was ordinary purification in a miqveh or a natural water source not enough? It seems obvious that people believed they were receiving more by letting John submerge them than by immersing themselves in a pool or river. In terms of the cognitive theory introduced above, John's special agent ritual would have been intuitively felt to be more powerful than a self-administered ritual purification. This is confirmed by the historical record: John's immersion rite achieved unprecedented success among his contemporaries. His practice produced the epithet ‘Baptist’ or ‘Baptiser’, and the popular movement around him grew big enough to pose a serious threat to the local ruler, Herod Antipas (Josephus, A.J. 18.116–19; Mark 6.14–29).

To take a more general perspective: a cognitive analysis of John the Baptist demonstrates why cultural and historical approaches should be supplemented by a consideration of intuitive psychological constraints. Assessing various culturally plausible interpretations is an indispensable part of our work as exegetes. Such analyses focus on the few extant references and interpretations in our sources (the New Testament and Josephus), as well as on the wider cultural background (such as descriptions of ritual bathing in early Judaism). What should not go unnoticed, however, is that such public narrative manifestations have only limited value in explaining people's actual behaviour. There is more to people's practices and beliefs than the explicit statements they are able to give (which in our materials also often derive from the educated elite and do not necessarily offer the perspective of ordinary people). Imagine an interview with the participants in a ritual practice in some historical context. People may not be willing or able to explain why they are participating in the ritual.Footnote ⁶⁰ Or they may just give ad hoc reasons for their participation. Maurice Bloch has recently made the same point in the context of social/cultural anthropology, arguing that ‘an anthropologist has to take into account the fact that all statements about beliefs, understandings, etc. that she may hear from informants have … been totally transformed by a very complex psychological process within the mind of the informants’.Footnote ⁶¹ These are always second-order interpretations, only remotely connected to the inner states that have led to the action.

3.3 Cognitive Theory Can Offer Tools for Analysing the Transmission of Biblical Traditions

As important as the discovery of the ‘cognitive basement’ is for the cognitive study of religion, the cognitive approach is not only about intuitive psychological constraints. To achieve a more complete picture of the cognitive approach, it should be recognised that a number of cognitive scholars of religion have tackled the issue of how to explain explicit religious knowledge in cognitive terms.

There is a range of different theoretical frameworks within which scholars have dealt with the issue. They have, for example, drawn on memory studies,Footnote ⁶² the duality of mind,Footnote ⁶³ embodied cognitionFootnote ⁶⁴ and co-evolutionary theories of cultural learning.Footnote ⁶⁵ It would be impossible to describe all these approaches here. Suffice it to take a few examples of how cognitive and evolutionary theories can shed light on the spread and transmission of the traditions about John the Baptist.

One way to approach the question is to ask what role was played in the transmission by ritual. The relationship between ritual and religious knowledge has been a traditional issue in the study of religion, and one variation on this question is related to semiotic approaches to ritual.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is indeed highly intuitive to ask what a given ritual ‘means’ or what kind of sign system it involves. A cognitive approach to ritual transmission, however, shifts the focus from the ‘meaning’ to different ways in which a ritual facilitates the spread and consolidation of religious beliefs. Whatever meanings and interpretations people attach to rituals, religious transmission would hardly be possible without rituals of one sort or another.

Harvey Whitehouse, who has pioneered cognitive approaches in social anthropology, offers the simple but important observation that religious traditions cannot emerge without two things taking place: first, people have to be able to remember the beliefs and rituals involved in the tradition, and second, they have to become motivated to pass on those beliefs and rituals.Footnote ⁶⁷ Memory and motivation are thus the crucial constraining factors in the transmission of a tradition.

Why did people remember John's rite, and pass on stories about him to others? To answer that question, we can draw on findings in memory studies.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is, for example, generally recognised that the memorability of an event is enhanced by emotional arousal.Footnote ⁶⁹ We can argue that John's baptism was an emotionally strong ritual: it involved the whole body and centred on the individual ritual patient. An interesting group of studies has demonstrated that one prominent factor that heightens the participant's memory concerning an event in which he or she is involved is self-relatedness.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is evident that John's immersion fosters self-relatedness, and hence the memorability of the rite, in several ways. The participants have made a personal decision to undergo John's immersion.Footnote ⁷¹ The ritual structure (special agent ritual) reinforces the idea that the ritual patient is receiving special attention from a superhuman being. Moreover, the patient is him/herself an agent in the act of confession (Mark 1.5; cf. Matt 3.6), which further makes the experience personal and memorable.

The issue of motivation is also crucial in the analysis of cultural transmission. People who heard stories about John must have been motivated to keep them in mind and pass them on. Theories of cultural learning are helpful in conceptualising this process. According to one such theory, cultural learning can be modelled as a process constrained by ‘transmission biases’, such as the strategies that people generally apply in acquiring information from those around them. For example, people usually accommodate the behaviour and knowledge of the majority; they also tend to imitate the successful and try to avoid being deceived.Footnote ⁷² In relation to the last point, Joseph Henrich has advanced an interesting notion of ‘credibility-enhancing displays’.Footnote ⁷³ The core idea is that successful beliefs in cultural transmission are often associated with costly behaviour by those who promote the beliefs. ‘Actions speak louder than words.’ It seems obvious that John's lifestyle, his special diet and outlook,Footnote ⁷⁴ together with the ultimate price that he paid for his prophetic ministry, functioned as ‘credibility-enhancing displays’, promoting his status as a prophet and offering a means for others to evaluate the truth value of his message.

It should be emphasised that none of these or other cognitive or cultural evolution theories can replace standard historical and source-critical work. Cognitive theories do not offer a simple ‘touchstone’, enabling us to decide which traditions are historically reliable or what actually happened at a particular moment of history. What the cognitive approach can do, however, is provide new frameworks for our historical work and help us to integrate New Testament exegesis with recent advances in the study of religion and human behaviour more generally.