ABSTRACT
Ritual has been an understudied theme in the study of Christian beginnings. This chapter provides a few examples of how ritual theory can enrich the study of earliest Christianity. It also presents a survey of how ritual has been studied in previous scholarship on Christian beginnings. The chapter then introduces insights and theories from a subfield of the study of religion dubbed the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), which has contributed significantly to the development of ritual theory since the mid 1990s. The History of Religion School (HRS) is the name attached to a group of biblical scholars and theologians who studied and taught at the University of Gottingen in the 1880s and 1890s, and who during the decades around the turn of the twentieth century championed a thoroughly historical approach to the study of biblical traditions. Baumstark's comparative approach was an ambitious attempt to analyse the history of liturgy as a matter of 'organic' development.
