Sacred books of religions of the world: Torah, Bible, Quran

Religious movements by their nature have three fundamental grounds on which the whole tradition holds: the teachers, the teachings transmitted by them, and the disciples who profess this teaching. In other words, a living religion is possible only in a group of convinced followers professing the doctrine preached by the founder. With regard to this article, we are talking about the second pillar - the doctrine, or rather its written source - the Holy Scripture.

General information

The Holy Scripture, whatever religious tradition it refers to, is the semantic core of the dogma. The sacred myth can ascribe its origin to the gods, prophets, messiahs, etc. In any case, its appearance is sanctioned from above and represents the transfer of divine knowledge - an indisputable truth, sent down from the realm of the beyond. This view of the sacred texts makes them in the eyes of believers a source of revelation and, in the literal sense, the word of God.

However, not all so unambiguously - the nature of each particular religion imposes a special imprint on the perception of the text, and the sacred books of the religions of the world have an ambiguous interpretation in the interpretation of their adherents.

The body of texts that are recognized as sacred is usually called a canon or canonical collection. Often he is given his own name, such as: The Koran is a sacred book of Muslims, the Jewish Torah or the Christian Bible.

Torah and Tanah - the sacred literature of Judaism

The oldest monotheistic religion is Judaism. Thanks to him, the birth saw Christianity and Islam. The sacred book of Judaism - Torah - is a collection of five works attributed to the tradition of the prophet Moses. According to legend, Moses received most of the contents of the Torah at Sinai, face to face with God.

The further development of the Jewish cult led to the emergence and dissemination of new texts, elevated by worshipers to the rank of sacred and inspired, that is, inspired from above by the Lord Himself. Such books include the collection "Ketuvim", which means "the Scriptures", and the collection "Neviim", which translates as "Prophets." Accordingly, the first included narratives of sacred history and the so-called literature of wisdom - an anthology of instructive parables, psalms and pedagogical works. In the second collection, a number of works of Jewish prophets were united. All of them were brought together in a single body of sacred texts, called "TaNaH". This word is an abbreviation composed of the first letters of the words Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim.

Tanakh in its composition, with minor modifications, is identical to the Old Testament of the Christian tradition.

A new revelation is a new Scripture. Sacred Books of Christians

The canon of the New Testament of the Christian church developed by the fourth century from a mass of heterogeneous literature. However, various currents and jurisdictions still have several different versions of the canon. In any case, the core of the New Testament is the four Gospels, accompanied by a series of apostolic epistles. The books of Acts and the Apocalypse stand apart. This structure allowed some commentators to compare the content of the New Testament with the Tanakh, relating the Gospel to the Torah, the Apocalypse with the prophets, the Acts with historical books, and the literature of wisdom with the Epistles of the Apostles.

A single collection of the Old and New Testaments is a Christian holy book, the Bible, that from the Greek language is translated simply "books".

The revelation of a new prophet. Muslim canon

The holy book of Muslims is called the Koran. It does not contain any meaningful fragments from the New Testament or the Tanakh, but to a considerable extent retells the content of the first of them. In addition, Isa is mentioned in it, that is, Jesus, but there is no correlation with the New Testament writings. Rather, on the contrary, the Koran observes controversy and distrust of the Christian Scripture.

The Muslim holy book - the Koran - is a collection of revelations received by Mohammed at different times from God and the archangel Gabriel (Dzhabraelya - in the Arab tradition). These revelations are called suras, and they are located in the text not in chronological order, but in length - from the longest to the shortest.

This is the position taken by Islam regarding the Judeo-Christian writings: the sacred book of the Jews - the Torah - is true. However, the time of her leadership has passed, and the Covenant with Moses is exhausted. So the Torah and the whole Tanakh are no longer relevant. The books of Christians are a fake, distorting the original gospel of the prophet Jesus, restored and continued by Mohammed. Therefore, the only holy book is the Koran, and the other can not be.

The Book of Mormon and the Biblical Revelation

Another attempt to bring their faith from the Mosaic source distinguished Mormonism. He recognizes both the Old and the New Testaments as sacred, but he attributes the highest authority to the so-called Book of Mormon. The adepts of this teaching believe that the original of their sacred text was written on gold plates, then hidden on a hill near New York, and was subsequently discovered by the angel to the prophet Joseph Smith, a 19th-century American. The latter performed the translation of the records into English under the divine guidance, after which they were again hidden by the angels in an unknown place. The sacred status of this work is now recognized by more than 10 million followers of the Mormon church.

Vedas - the heritage of the ancient gods

Sacred books of monotheistic religions of the world are united in single collections and collected in codes. Eastern polytheistic systems are distinguished by a different approach to the sacred writings: they are of an independent nature, often doctrinally unrelated and contradictory. Therefore, at first glance, the system of the scriptures of dharmic religions may seem confused or unnecessarily confused. However, this is only at first glance.

Sacred texts of Hinduism are called Shruti. The last consists of four Vedas. Each of them is divided into two parts: samhit (hymns) and brahman (instructions of the ritual order). This is the most authoritative corpus of every orthodox Hindu. In addition to the Shruti, there is also the body of Smriti - tradition. Smriti is a written source and at the same time authoritative enough to be included in the number of sacred books. It includes 18 puranas and two large epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In addition, in the Hindu religion is still revered Upanishad. These texts are treatises mystically interpreting the brahmana.

The precious word of Buddha

Prince Siddhartha preached a lot, and the speeches he once uttered form the basis of the canonical sacred texts of Buddhism-sutras. It should immediately be stipulated that there is no such thing as a sacred book of Buddhism, in the traditional monotheistic sense. In Buddhism there is no God, which means there is no inspired literature. There are only texts written by enlightened teachers. This is what gives them credibility. As a result, Buddhism has a fairly extensive list of sacred books, which makes it difficult to study and systematize them.

In southern Buddhism, predominantly in the tradition of Theravadins, the so-called Pali canon - the Tripitaka - is adopted as a sacred book of Buddhism. Other Buddhist schools disagree with this and offer their own versions of sacred literature. The most impressive is the school of Tibetan Buddhism Gelug: the composition of its sacred canon includes the collections of Ganjur (Buddha's speeches) and Dandjur (commentaries on Ganjur) with a total volume of 362 volumes.

Conclusion

Above were listed the main sacred books of the religions of the world - the most vivid and relevant for our time. Of course, this list of texts is not limited, as it is not limited to the list of the mentioned religions. Many pagan cults do not have a codified script at all, calmly avoiding the oral mythological tradition. Others, although they have authoritative cult-forming works, yet do not incriminate them with a sacred supernatural nature. Some canons of a few religious traditions have remained outside the brackets and have not been considered in this review, because even briefly to illuminate the sacred books of the religions of the world without exception can only allow the encyclopedia, but not a small article.