An Exploration Of The Biblical Metaphors From A Cognitive Perspective

The Bible is a miracle of human civilization. It took more than 1,500 years to combine the Old Testament and the New Testament. So far, the Bible has a very long history of about 3,500 years. For Christians, it is the classics of belief and the necessity for people to be saved, because God spread the redemptive message through the Bible. The Bible is also the greatest literature exerting a deep influence on the western literary and culture. As for the linguistic art of the Bible, a large number of theologians and scholars in different fields have attached great importance and devoted their efforts to studying the Bible from the rhetorical perspective all the time in order to discover the mysteries of the Bible, which is still confined to the rhetoric level.Nowadays, the popular conceptual metaphor makes us believe that the abundant metaphors in Bible are not only the magic of language use, but also the real reflection of man's metaphorical thinking. It is in accord with man's cognitive mode when Bible uses metaphors to reveal spiritual truths about God.This thesis, by applying the cognitive metaphor theories, classifies the biblical metaphors, summarizes their characteristics and analyzes some complex story metaphors to testify the interpretivity of the theories and demonstrate the universality of metaphoric thought of human. This thesis finds that biblical metaphors have a large number of common objects as source domains and the targets are abstract doctrine and godly truth, that biblical metaphors are intertextual, that conceptual metaphor theory is less interpretive than conceptual blending theory to some complex biblical metaphors and the conceptual blending theory is less interpretive than Relevance Blending Mode to much complex biblical metaphors.