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What is scripture?
This question is just as challenging as the other question: what is
sacred music?
The dictionary is of little help, telling us only that scripture
means sacred writing. It comes from the Latin past participle
scriptus, meaning written. Much further back, we find the
Indo-European root skribh, meaning to cut or separate
(probably because the first writings were etchings in wood or
stone).
However, new light has been shed on the nature of scriptures over
the last couple of centuries, and especially during the last few
decades, by scholars in comparative religion. They have not been
able to give us a definition of scripture (as impossible as defining
sacred music), but they have made important discoveries about the
nature of existing scriptures, and about the historical and
psychosocial processes which are involved in producing holy
scripture. Because these discoveries are so little-known to the
general public, we offer a small bibliography on this subject below.
We have (temporarily) limited our scope to Mediterranean religions, mainly the
Abrahamic traditions.
Two very important points emerge from this work. The first is
obvious, but difficult to accept for many religious believers. The
second is not at all obvious, and is perhaps even more difficult to accept for
non-believers than for believers.
1) All scriptures that have come down to us from ancient times are the product of countless generations of
rewriting and re-editing. Scholars often refer to this process as
redaction.
2) Ancient attitudes toward sacred writing were radically different
from those which prevail today. For example, the typical modern
reader is somewhat scandalized, or perhaps just cynical, upon
learning that the Gospel of John was neither written nor dictated
by John, nor by any other disciple of Jesus, and that John almost certainly never even knew of its existence. The modern mind jumps to the conclusion: therefore the
person who wrote that gospel (for simplicity, let us assume it was
one man who wrote it after John's death, though the real
situation is much more complex) was a charlatan, and the
gospel is a fraud. But the ancient mind would not have been so quick
to judge. For a religious person of two millenia ago, the question as to
whether John actually wrote it was of secondary importance. What was
important was the question: is the scribe who wrote it a member of
an authentic, unbroken lineage of disciples going back to
John? And above all the question: is this gospel truly inspired
by John? Was the writer a true vehicle for the spirit of
John?
This suggests a way of approaching all "inspired" writings and
indeed, many other writings which are not labeled in this way. This
attitude of openness, which is both ancient and new, frees us from
habits of facile judgement. The question of who actually wrote the
Bible, the works of Shakespeare, or whether Gurdieff's autobiography is really "factual" becomes of secondary importance. The question of
authenticity becomes much more open, and the value of what is being
communicated through the vehicle of "scripture" regains its rightful
place of importance.
In this spirit, we invite interested readers to offer submissions to
this web page of writings scripts, scriptures, scribblings,
essays, and poems, which turn around this subject.
[for submissions, write us here: joseph at naturalchant.com]
As the beginning essay demonstrates, this spirit of openness sees no
contradiction between scholarship and creativity, between
seriousness and playfulness.
We open the page with a document which was at the origins of our
musical project, Credo. And we provide the full notes to the CD,
which unfortunately were deleted from the album itself by the
producer. |
