At this year’s EABS conference, our project team presented two papers in the session “Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary Perspectives on the Biblical World” (chaired by Ronit Nikolsky, Zdeňka Špiclová, and Nina Nikki).
Our contributions explored the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) through the lens of Oliver Scott Curry’s Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC) theory, which identifies seven universal moral domains reflecting evolutionary solutions to cooperative challenges—family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness, and property rights.
The first paper introduced the MAC framework and a pilot study in which five annotators categorized moral statements from the Sermon using ATLAS.ti, a qualitative data analysis tool. The second paper presented the results, indicating that while MAC theory appears broadly applicable to the Sermon, annotators faced challenges due to the text’s literary and metaphorical complexity.
Together, the papers showcased both the promise and the methodological challenges of applying evolutionary moral theory to early Christian texts, laying a foundation for future research within our project.
The study has been published in the Open Theology special issue: Mathematically Modeling Early Christian Literature: Theories, Methods and Future Directions, edited by Erich Benjamin Pracht, and is openly accessible: