Holey Books
Religion can be temples, or holidays, or experiences, or prayer/meditation, or rites of passages, or maxims, or …books — holy books. When do books become holy/Holy …truth?
It is often believed that these books were written by the creators of these religions.
The often believed Mosaic (by Moses) authorship of the first five books of the Christian Bible — the Torah — is refuted by Deuteronomy 34:5
The biggest religions of the world have Holy Books and they were not written by their creators, except one and it is literally holey. :)
Moses - the Torah - nope. See above. Much of it was probably written 500 years after Moses death.
Jesus - New Testament - nope. Wikipedia — the closest source to truth that humanity has creator/found/had will tell you the who, where, when, and how of it.
Muhammad - Quran - nope. Assembled by his calph/successor and father-in law after Muhammad’s death. Surah/chapter 39:30
Confucius - Analects - nope - written by his followers hundreds of years after he died.
Buddha (Gautama) - the Sutras - nope - the Pali cannon was assembled in Sri Lanka in the 1st century BCE, about 500 years after he died. Though oral traditions are very reliable in India (probably the most so), these passages have a long and complicated history as do the rest above.
Laozi - Dao De Jing …now this is a funny one. Laozi, or old master, is a funny birth name. We aren’t even sure if there was one real man represented by that that honorific — zi or master — title. Is he a Tamil from Southern India. Maybe his name is Er, Boyang, or Lao Dan. I have copy of the De Dao Jing that is from before the great book burning of Emperor Qin Shihuangdi in 213 BCE. The book has a more philosophic section on the Dao and more legalistic section on the De that are switched in that version. Supposedly, he was asked to write his ideas down at the Western edge of China before he left the civilization. Were he and his water buffalo going back to India? This the same route that Buddhism will take into China a 1000 years later. Ha, this book is actually holey. The oldest versions are like old Chinese books, written on slats/slips that connected by strings.
Mahavira - assembled by a disciple, then lost, and then reassembled.
Zoroaster - Gathas - we aren’t sure if or when he lived so everything after that is up in the air.
Sikhism’s very recent Guru Granth Sahib show the evolution of a complicated religious text. And it is only 500 years old.
Lincoln - We don’t even know what was completely, accurately, fully in the Gettysburg Address for there a many different versions and copies.
The Upanishads seem ready to up the game and trump them all.
These books may be mashups, but happy reading. :) Open a book and open your mind, but never believe a book that tells you to close your eyes, your heart, or your mind.