Scriptures & Texts

243 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.

The canonical scriptures of the world's religions: the Vedas and Upanishads, the Torah and Tanakh, the Gospels, the Quran, the Pali Canon, the Guru Granth Sahib and others. Each entry records what the text is, the religion it belongs to and its place in that tradition. Questions of authorship, date and canon are contested for most of them, and the entries note that rather than resolving it.

Facts

Overview

Entries in the Atlas: 243
What Defines This Grouping: Texts a community holds to be authoritative - revealed, inspired or foundational - grouped by the tradition that receives them. The kind and degree of that authority differs greatly between traditions and is not a property of the class. 1

Structure

Structure: Canonical, deuterocanonical and apocryphal texts spanning many religious traditions 1

Status

Standing as a Comparative Category: A standard comparative category, with the caveat the field insists on: scripturality is a relation between a community and a text, not a quality of the text, and several works here were transmitted orally for centuries before being written. 1

Sources

Encyclopedia of Religion Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), 2005, s.v. Scripture

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The Canonical Scriptures of the Religions

This category holds the canonical scriptures of the world's religions: the Vedas and Upanishads, the Torah and the wider Tanakh, the Gospels and the rest of the Christian Bible, the Quran, the Pali Canon, the Guru Granth Sahib and others. Each entry records what the text is, the religion it belongs to, and its place in that tradition's life and authority.

A scripture is not simply a book but a book a community holds to be authoritative, revealed, inspired or foundational, and the degree and kind of authority differs greatly between traditions, from verbatim revelation to inspired testimony to a canon assembled over centuries.

Canon, Transmission and Criticism

How a scripture came to be (composed, compiled, transmitted and finally fixed as canon), is often a long and studied history, and the atlas distinguishes the tradition's account of a text's origin from the findings of textual scholarship. Oral transmission, multiple authorship, editing and translation lie behind many scriptures that a tradition receives as a unity.

The entries note the text's language, rough date and structure, its status within its tradition, and, where relevant, the main lines of scholarly study, keeping confessional and historical-critical views clearly apart. The esoteric and occult literature is treated separately under the esoteric-text category.