Epistle / letter

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.

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.