by Stephen Harris

Created on: October 09, 2008

Something that is important to all students of religion is the notion that throughout history, many religious adherants did not have a written system of language with which to transcribe their traditions, faith, rituals, etcetera. As a result many religions have also died out in history when those practicing are all dispersed or perish.

What makes written text so important is that by putting your faith in writting, you are doing a couple of things. For one, you are now subjecting it to scrutiny and establishing a basis with which to say, this is right and this is what we believe; everything else is wrong. Writing is also important to a religion because it makes it more preservable. If the culture dies, the documents may not and still survive for another to read.

A familiar religion with which this was quite true was that of the Jews. Throughout the history of Jewish diaspora the Jewish people have maintianed their identity by taking the oral tradition of the elders and writing them down on paper, giving us the scriptures that we have today. A popular event to recall in history was the Babylonian captivity of the Jewish people from Jerusalem. Having been taken from their homeland, the many oral traditions of the elders were potentially at risk for being influenced by the cosmopolitan culture of the Babylonians. To preserve their culture, many of the earliest manuscripts we have left were written.

A familiar religion that did NOT have a written religious code were the religions of the American Indians. Their religions survived for thousands of years and still do to this day because of oral tradition and community. Within each tribe there is a well defined system and code of religious belief and ethics. These have always survived because of such things.

Perhaps a more accurate question would have been, "Are sacred texts required of a religion?" The answer to this question has been demonstrated to be not, as even with the development of religion from an evolutionary stance, there was not always written language until the earliest cuneiform that we know of created by the Sumerians around 3000 BCE. Prior to such a means to record the doctrines of one's faith whether it had been ethics, a creation story or a collection of rituals, many had to rely on oral tradition passed on by a culture's elders to its youth and so on, infinitum.

I had to side on the "yes" side of this argument out of the default logic of "Texts are written down. Sacred texts are texts. Therefore sacred texts must be written down."

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