Cognitive Perspectives on Early Christology


Central to all christological models are concepts of agency, identity, and divinity, but few scholars have directly addressed these frameworks within their ancient West Asian contexts. Rather, the proclivity has been to retroject modern, Eurocentric, and binary frameworks onto the ancient texts, res...

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Bibliographic Details
Subtitles:The Futures of Biblical Studies
Main Author: McClellan, Daniel O. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brill 2017
In: Biblical interpretation
Year: 2017, Volume: 25, Issue: 4/5, Pages: 647-662
RelBib Classification:AA Study of religion
HD Early Judaism
NBC Doctrine of God
NBE Anthropology
NBF Christology
Further subjects:B Christology divine agency divine identity divinity cognitive science of religion

Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Parallel Edition:Non-electronic
Description
Summary:Central to all christological models are concepts of agency, identity, and divinity, but few scholars have directly addressed these frameworks within their ancient West Asian contexts. Rather, the proclivity has been to retroject modern, Eurocentric, and binary frameworks onto the ancient texts, resulting in christological models that inevitably reflect modern orthodoxies and ontological categories. The future of christological research will depend on moving beyond this tendentiousness. In an effort to begin this process, this paper will apply findings from the cognitive sciences – which examine the way the human brain structures its perception of the world around it – to the reconstruction of ancient frameworks of agency, identity, and divinity. Applying these findings to early Jewish literature reveals the intuitive conceptualization of God’s agency, reified as the divine name, as a communicable vehicle of divine presence and authority. These observations support the conclusion that early Jewish conceptualizations of divine agency provided a conceptual template for the development of early christology.

ISSN:1568-5152
Contains:Enthalten in: Biblical interpretation
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/15685152-02545P11