The Sacred Text

I am intrigued by the question of the response of the community whose [sacred] text has been “critically edited.” Of course when this is done, it no longer is a sacred text, because it is no longer the text which the community has always regarded as sacred; it is a scholars’ text. So, in a sense, there can be no such thing as the critical editing of sacred texts.

Paul Ricoeur, “The Sacred Text and the Community,” in The Critical Study of Sacred Texts, Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, editor. Berkeley Religious Studies Series, Graduate Theological Union, 1979, p. 271. Ricoeur also writes, “It is a hermeneutical act to recognize oneself as founded by a text and to read this text as founding. There is reciprocity between the reading and the existing self-recognition of the identity of the community. There is a kind of reciprocity between the community and the text.” p. 272.