Early Christian Mind

Why Cognitive Science?

Much of the discussion about early Christianity concentrates on the "theology", "teaching", "doctrines", or "ethics" of selected Christian persons and groups. The advantage of these concepts is that they highlight issues that are interesting for modern Christians, and make information about early Christianity immediately relevant for contemporary theological discussion.
When we examine the "teaching of Jesus" or the "theology of Paul", we use etic categories that are often incompatible with the structure of ancient evidence. These concepts reflect expectations that cannot be ignored in the historical and exegetical work. In fact, our Vorverständnis enables us to ask questions and engage in dialogue with any text. Our concepts can be viewed as channels of communication that enable us to exchange data but also filter information.

The Early Christian Mind project attempts to open alternative channels of communication with the help of cognitive science in order to understand aspects of the thought-world of early Christianity that remained hidden before previous research. Instead of using etic categories such as "theology", we examine elementary cognitive models on which Christians relied when thinking about each other and the world around them.
Cognitive scientific models are appropriate for this task because they concentrate on the general rules of human thinking that are less culture-specific than most other models used in the study of early Christianity. When we use cognitive models to understand the thought-world of ancient people, we can assume that it consisted of similar cognitive building blocks (maps, schemas, scripts) as the thought-world of people in other cultures.