Part III brings together five studies that deal with the religious phenomenon of scripture, both as a generic phenomenon and as it functions specifically in particular traditions, from the Islamic to the Christian to the Hindu. A major focus here, as in several of the qurâÄnic studies in Part II, is the oral/aural dimension of scriptural piety in many, if not most, of the great traditions of religious life that have relied upon sacred texts as mainstays of theology, ethics, liturgy and ritual, and both personal and communal piety.
The first essay, âScriptureâ (Chapter 11), is the most general. It was written for the Encyclopedia of Religion (eds. M. Eliade et al.), which was first published in 1987. It was only lightly revised for the second edition which appeared in 2001. In this essay, I try to present scripture as a genre of religious text that is identifiable not by its form or content, but only by its relationship to a particular religious community and tradition. The same text may be scripture for one group and just another text for a different group. To be labeled âscriptureâ, a text has to be received by individuals and their community as one that is fundamentally different from all other texts, in that it possesses unique sacrality and authority in and for their lives. After a resumĂ© of the origins and development of the concept itself, I seek further in the essay to do some justice to the huge variety of scriptures around the world, but also to discuss the most common recurring functions that mark a text or texts as sacred and authoritative. These are its roles as holy writ, as spoken word, in public ritual, in devotional life, and in superstition and magic. Next I try to identify characteristic attributes of scriptures: power, authority and sacrality, unicity, inspiration and eternality or great antiquity. Finally, I survey related developments such as canon formation, interpretation, and translation (and resistance to translation), and I close with some observations on the cultural impact of scriptural textsâin language, literature, art, architecture, and music.
The second essay, âScripture as Spoken Wordâ (Chapter 12), moves to the oral dimensions of scriptural use and piety in the major scripture-based traditions of religious life around the world. (This essay was the preliminary study that led me ultimately to undertake the larger project on oral aspects of written sacred texts that is represented by Beyond the Written Word [1987].) Using as point of departure my previous work on the QurâÄnâs primarily oral/aural function among Muslims, I move into consideration of, first, the degree to which our modern (especially Western) high-literacy print culture, and within that, our modern scholarly culture in particular, have come to be dominated by the printed wordâto such an extent that we have skewed our understanding of how our own Christian and Jewish scriptures have functioned in the past for the faithful and even more how Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or other scriptural âbooksâ have functioned in fundamentally oral/aural ways for their faithful. The essay considers especially evidence from the Indian and Christian traditions, which at first blush seem very far apart in terms of their focus on oral or written textuality in their interactions with their scriptural texts. I try to show that we have missed in both cases the primarily oral dimensions of scriptural pietyâin the Christian âbookâ tradition no less than in the Hindu ârecited scriptureâ tradition. This fact has to be reckoned with for any adequate understanding of how scriptures function and âliveâ in any and all religious traditions.
The next two essays are from Beyond the Written Word. They are two of the four most focused and specific âcaseâ studies in that work, each of which treats the oral function of written scripture in a single tradition or segment of a tradition (the four are the Indian (Vedic and later texts) tradition, the Islamic (QurâÄn) tradition, the scriptural tradition of early Christian monasticism, and the reformation Bible tradition represented in the writing and preaching of Martin Luther). Chapter 13 is a reprint of Chapter 6 of the book, âScripture as Spoken Word: the Indian Paradigmâ, under the simpler title, âThe Indian Paradigm for Scriptural Oralityâ. It deals with the primary orality of the Vedas and even PurÄnic and later regional or sectarian sacred texts in Indian usage (some of this material is broached in brief in the previous article in this section as well). Chapter 14 is a reprint of Chapter 11 of the book, âGodâs Word in the Desertâ, to which I have added the subtitle, âPachomian Scriptural Practiceâ. This is a study of oral engagement with Christian scripture among the Pachomian monastics in Upper Egypt in the third and fourth centuries, which provides a discrete case study in a single early Christian context of the fundamentally oral and aural function of the Bible in spirituality and practice.
The final selection (Chapter 15) is a paper that grew out of an opening plenary session address to the American Academy of Religion at its annual meeting in November 1989; I later reworked and expanded this (at the request of my Japanese hosts) into another plenary address, this time to the Japanese Association for Religious Studies annual meeting held in Tenri in September 2003. In its latter form, as âReflections on Comparative Study in Religion: Scripture as Case in Pointâ, it offers a set of reflections on how I try to do, and suggest that we try to do, comparative study of religious phenomena. specifically, I base my suggestions on my experience of rather lengthy investigations in pursuit of the oral dimensions of written scriptures, which grew into Beyond the Written Word. It seems a fitting way to end this small collection, both because it confronts the issue of comparative study, which has been central to my scholarship and my teaching in particular over my career, and because it does so with specific reference to the various studies of scriptural traditions that have occupied me in one way or another for much of the last three decades.