THE EMERGENCE OF EARLY CHRISTIAN RELIGION: A NATURALISTIC APPROACH

This essay will assess some algorithmic models of social behavior for understanding religiosity and look for ways of applying such models to the emergence of early Christian religion. I will be operating especially within the theoretical framework of distributed, self-organizing, and dynamical systems. Why do we need such an approach in the study of (early Christian) religion? For a long time, historians have been looking in vain for causal laws that explain the course of history (cf. Buchanan 2000; Casti 2003). We do not know rules that would enable us to predict the behavior of individuals or groups—not to mention whole societies or cultures. It seems that the development of history, culture, and society involve such complex interactions of underlying factors that predictive models of them cannot be constructed. Consequently, we cannot reconstruct the emergence of early Christianity as a chain of causal links. It does not mean, however, that there is nothing to say about the history o