The New Testament as a Model: Reading the Bible with Richard Dawkins

Abstract

The New Testament is a cultural canon that fundamentally shaped the development of Christian Europe and the entire Christian world. The Bible can be seen as a repository of ideas and behavioral rules that have been read and interpreted by many generations of (cultural) Christians. The ideas and behavioral rules that became part of the Bible, as well as their specific combinations and intertextual relationships, went through a long process of cultural selection and can be studied from the point of view of cultural evolution. <p>

<p>In this article, I will draw on the ideas of evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins to outline a reading strategy of the New Testament as a model of the environments in which it evolved. As will become clear, Dawkins’ recent suggestions about evolution offer, perhaps unexpectedly, some intriguing connections with the concept of resonance phenomena in human thought and behavior.