The biblical story retold

In this chapter I offer one, or a small set of, possible interpretation(s) of the basic story of the Bible. I suggest that the symbolic meaning of the story derives in large part from conceptual structures and conceptual mechanisms that are shared by a large number of speakers of English and other languages belonging to the European cultural sphere. My claim is that a large part of the dominant features of Christianity can be understood on the basis of people’s everyday conceptual system and that the understanding of these features does not require an entirely independently existing conceptual apparatus that is somehow unique to the interpretation of the sacred.