Abstract
Religions place different priorities on textual traditions, and it is necessary to be aware that not every text plays an important role in religion is a “Sacred Book.” But it is beyond doubt that Sacred Books play(ed) an important role in the history of religions, as often they were taken as undisputed sources for studying religions with a “constitutive” significance for the religion in question. Despite of this, there always have been tensions between “writing” and the effectiveness of the spoken word.
A trans-regional distribution of Sacred Books began long before the modern age of globalization, as processes of translating and spreading such texts or books were necessary when a religion started to expand from its original area to other regions. This also made it necessary to interpret Sacred Books in a new cultural context; therefore, the spreading of religions and globalization challenges hermeneutic processes. The more a Sacred Book is known not only to specialists, but also to the public, the more also the normativity and the exclusiveness sometimes become relative. This also leads to a change of religions in modern times.
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Notes
- 1.
Klaus Hock, Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002, p. 31.
- 2.
Cf. Max Deeg/Oliver Freiberger/Christoph Kleine (eds.), Kanonisierung und Kanonbildung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte, Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2011.
- 3.
Cf. Plato, Phaidros (274c–277c), in: Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 9, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1925, online at: www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0173%3atext%3dPhaedrus (last accessed 28.11.2017).
- 4.
Cf. Kristina Myrvold, The Death of Holy Scripture. Ritual Disposal and Renovation of Texts in World Religions, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
- 5.
Cf. Wolfgang Reinhard (ed.), Sakrale Texte. Hermeneutik und Lebenspraxis in den Schriftkulturen, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009, p. 24.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 7.
Cf. Udo Tworuschka (ed.), Heilige Schriften. Eine Einführung, Frankfurt/Main: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2008, pp. 16–19.
- 8.
Cf. Wolfgang Reinhard (ed.), Sakrale Texte. Hermeneutik und Lebenspraxis in den Schriftkulturen, op. cit., pp. 10f.
- 9.
Ibid., pp. 8f.
- 10.
Cf. Norman J. Girardot, Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East and the Nineteenth-Century Production, in: History of Religions 41, 2001/2002, pp. 213–250.
Literature
Deeg, Max/Freiberger, Oliver/Kleine, Christoph (eds.), Kanonisierung und Kanonbildung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte, Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2011.
Girardot, Norman J., Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East and the Nineteenth-Century Production, in: History of Religions 41, 2001/2002, pp. 213–250.
Hock, Klaus, Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002.
Myrvold, Kristina, The Death of Holy Scripture. Ritual Disposal and Renovation of Texts in World Religions, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 9, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1925, online at: www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0173%3atext%3dPhaedrus (last accessed 28.11.2017).
Reinhard, Wolfgang (ed.), Sakrale Texte. Hermeneutik und Lebenspraxis in den Schriftkulturen, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009.
Tworuschka, Udo (ed.), Heilige Schriften. Eine Einführung. Frankfurt/Main: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2008.
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Hutter, M. (2019). Sacred Books. In: Kühnhardt, L., Mayer, T. (eds) The Bonn Handbook of Globality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90382-8_57
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