Passages

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A passage is a short, citation length excerpt from a scripture or another authoritative text, recorded here for the sake of its own specific wording rather than as a stand in for the larger work it comes from. Genesis 1:1 through 3, a single line of the Tao Te Ching, one passage of the Analects, one stanza of the Havamal, each is quoted because it is directly relevant to some other entry on the atlas, a doctrine it illustrates, an event it describes, a practice it grounds.

This is the smaller counterpart to a Scripture Portion entry, which records a whole named division of a specific text, the chapter rather than the line. A passage entry states which work it is drawn from, which edition or translation is being quoted, and where in the source text it falls, so that a reader who wants the fuller context around a short quotation always has a clear path back to it rather than a line floating free of where it came from.

The atlas links a passage to whatever other entry it supports, a doctrine, an event, a practice, so a reader who wants to know why a particular line was chosen can trace it straight back to the specific claim it is being cited to establish, rather than encountering the quotation on its own with no stated reason for its presence.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Quoting a single line of scripture carries two risks that a longer excerpt mostly avoids. The first is translation: a short passage read in one language rarely maps onto a single unambiguous meaning in another, and scholars working from the original languages routinely disagree about how a given line should be rendered, which is why textual criticism, the discipline of comparing surviving manuscripts and editions to establish the most reliable reading, exists as a field in its own right rather than an afterthought to translation.

The second risk is context. A line lifted out of the passage surrounding it can read very differently than it does inside its original argument or narrative, and traditions themselves frequently dispute how a much cited line should be read once its neighboring verses are restored. A responsible citation names its translation and edition, states plainly where the line sits within the larger text, and does not let a short quotation stand in for a claim about what the whole work teaches.

Different traditions also hold different views on whether their own scripture can be adequately rendered in translation at all, some treating a translation as functionally equivalent to the source and others holding that only the original language carries full authority, and a careful passage entry notes that difference rather than treating every translation as interchangeable with the text it renders.