Grasping abstract notions via embodied language in Mark's Gospel
Abstract
Jesus of Nazareth used parables to convey religious concepts with an unparalleled mastery of everyday experience. These “examples” were pedagogical tools for communicating moral and religious content in a concrete manner. However, evaluating this concreteness requires consideration of recent developments in embodiment neuroscience concerning how language acquires meaning and conveys content. This paper employs these neuroscientific developments to explore the concreteness of Jesus’ language, and shows how the perspective of embodied language aligns with the three levels of concreteness identified in the parables’ narrative.
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