Sebomai wrote:We are all familiar with writings termed "Scriptural." The Bible, both Testaments, the Q'uran, the Vedas, the Sutras of Buddhism, the Gnostic texts, the early writings of the lamas from Tibet. Even mythological texts carry a Scriptural weight with many modern pagans.
The word "Scripture" indicates a writing of some kind of deep and profound, oftentimes Divine, authority. But are there any writings in the last few hundred years that anyone here would consider Scriptural? Anything past the time of the rise of the great religious traditions? Or maybe older works that aren't commonly recognized as having that authority but you personally think deserve it? They can be occult or religious or mythological or even particularly deep metaphysical philosophy works.
I think the most recent example of a book that has a lot of adherents who consider it Scripture that I can think of is Crowley's The Book of the Law. I don't consider it as such but Thelemites certainly do.
An excellent question. Of course, the word '
scriptura' is latin and we have a long tradition of considering the
Bible as
the scripture, at least in the latin language, which long prevailed as
the official and even “sacred“ language of the church after roman legacy. You've also capitulazied the first letter, which is the way for example Augustine does it, i.e. '
Scripturas' in difference to mere scriptures as something writ
ten. It's good to take some notice about the being writ
ten of these scriptures and why they even in Augustine's time were not anymore being writ
ed. As we all know, the process of canonizing the
Bible was a certain historical process which started to take place, probably in
some form immediately even in the preceding oral tradition, but as more organized when christianity steadily gained publicity
and power over official positions. It should be reminded, that
some form of discussion about the authenticity of this or that rumour of course happened even in the oral tradition. Oral traditions could even be quite accurate, e.g. Homer's works in the ancient Greece. When a rumour gains
official status as an important tale of the community, it also comes under the attention of differing structures of society, i.e.
social classes.
We could compare the situation to the place of
grammatics as a '
kanōn' for
ruling about the structures of language of the same time.
Grammatical structures are abstractions of
identity , which are in their
canonical form provided by the ruling social
elite of early societes to control the
variety of speech found in the everyday conversations of the
common rubble. This kind of
ruling over language comes first a topic by the civilized ruling class
for the purposes of ruling the common rubble. For example, Varro enlightens the benefits of grammatical
uniformity by the acquisition of slaves: when slaves are introduced to a household, they will more quickly learn the differences in commands, if the language is structured. The common rubble doesn't have households with multiple slaves and don't have the corresponding need to introduce grammatical uniformity to speech, at least not in the same degree. Then, for example
declination of nouns as the '
analogos', is a more
canonical way of using speech, which corresponds closely to a special setting of purposes, as do uneveness in language as the '
anōmalos'.
Christianity does not start by
canonizing it through a certain set of rules, which would later be given even sacred authority, even as the latin language in it's
finished form, i.e. as a
dead language. It's noteworthy, that before canonizing the rumours of Christ as “
Scriptura“ by the more civilized and powerful classes, it was mostly property of the lower class rubble, the '
vulgus'. It's not like oral tradition couldn't be at least nearly as accurate as writing, since especially the more common class of people in earlier times used writing only a little or not at all, and were consequently much better in
memoriziation of long sentences. It's like in the old egyptian story about the inventing of writing: it's quite accurately called a device for
forgetting. We can't be sure about the contents of the oral tradition preceding written stories about Christ, but the
mindset certainly was different. Ancient people were not all that dumb and even though the lack of a fixed scripture probably makes distortions of the original sentences more likely to happen, it also favours the obvious consciousness
about the orality of this tradition. Tongue is more
flexible than writing and the consciousness of this in a way guards the oral tradition against misperceived “eternal“ accuracy of writing.
When the writings were fixed, it was much more credible to give them a divine, i.e. “eternal“ authority as the one-and-only, which can be securely possessed and made reference to, which ended up in rather
eternal squandering over commas, hyphes, apostrophes, etc. It's a pretty good saying of Kierkegaard, that God doesn't like a
pettifogger and canonizing the oral tradition as “scripture“ gave at least the civilized classes something to squander over, which eventually gave birth to a certain class of priests who hold the divine more
securely as a possession, like e.g. a grammatic's teacher holds power over the detailed structures of language, more pertinent to certain
ruling classes. Even as throughout history we can find in some form the difference between the “official“ language and more “vulgar“ dialects, the good message of Christ eventually become the property of pettifoggers. Luther changed only one aspect of this: it's not only the “priests“ who should have the privilege of nitpicking, but
everyone should be
such a priest in their own christian right. This of course can't be blamed only on Luther, who had more advanced understanding of interpretation.
It's in a certain way better to know nothing about a subject and be conscious of
this, than to know something about it and be convince oneself of knowing already
everything about it. Oral tradition
can be very accurate and detailed, even though even in such form it will still probably be more or less property of a special class to remember it in such a
degree, but the multiplicity of traditions should make one more conscious, that detail should not be given exceptional and unnecessary attention here. The so called
synoptic evangeliums still conserve this
richness in form, which is better exactly because it doesn't pretend to be totally accurate, even by the standards of it's own time of origination. The
Bible as the “holy“ and “inspired“ book of christianity is a
hoax with no basis on the word of Christ, even though the “word“ of Christ is supposedly preserved more originally in the texts than it
might have done as a living oral tradition. It's not as if the books were to be condemned in favor of an
imagined oral tradition, it's well enough to be conscious about the fact, that by this book christianity certainly is not
originally about a
book as the “word“ of God, but about
Christ as the word of God. Even thinking merely
historically it's quite preposterous to think that historical figures, e.g. Socrates or Christ would have their
historical being only as a certain vibration in the air or as ink on a book's page, since air and books don't themselves
bleed or sweat, nor do they die of poison, but Christ bleeds and sweats, as Socrates dies of poison.