How did the author and the audience of the deutero-Pauline (Best 2004: 24–36) letter to the Ephesians experience that the behavioral norms in the letter were obliging, important, relevant, and true for them as Saints and Christ-believers? How could the norms of the letter, if practiced, contribute to the group dynamics of the group and the sense that the group was valuable? Why did the letter have the rhetorical power to induce the perception that the norms in the letter were normative for the recipients and that they needed to improve their behavior? In this chapter, I will lean on insights about basic cognitive properties of our minds in order to answer these questions.

As unbridgeable as the gap between us and the experience of the Christ-believing subjects of the past may seem, cognitive sciences can help us to reach some degree of understanding, across time and culture, of how first-century Christ-believers constructed their social identity. One of the most basic insights of cognitive science is that many basic properties of our minds are biologically innate and therefore form the cognition of humans in all cultures (e.g., Carruthers et al. 2005–8; Hirschfeld & Gelman 1994; Lakoff & Johnson 1999). “Innate” does not mean that babies are born with these capacities fully developed, nor that it is impossible to create an environment for babies that would prevent these capacities from developing or that no individuals may be born with cognitive handicaps.