The gods of everyone should wake
And wag their sleepy tongues
Give us all here something new to read
(light fingered from The Righteous Corn Farmers' Grate)
Bear with me for a moment; I'm going to whine.
Circa 2000 BC, the Jewish faith comes into being. The last of the texts of the Hebrew Bible is committed to physical form at roughly 500 BC (though I may well be wrong here as I haven't done very thorough research, it shouldn't detract from my line of thought).
Circa AD 50, the first texts that make up the New Testament are put to parchment (or whatever). The last texts are completed a few hundred years after (giving the benefit of the doubt to a later creation).
Circa AD 500, Muhammad receives the word of God from the angel Gabriel. That was recorded maybe... AD 700, if the scribes were slow.
At this point I'll level with you, I know very little about Hinduism. So if anyone provides me with rough dates for the creation of Hindu scripture, I'll take that into account.
That issue aside, what we have here are three of the most influential (and in the case of the Islamic and Christian faiths, largest) religious bodies' texts that haven't been significantly updated in 2500, 1600 and 1300 years respectively (obviously they've undergone translation and to a greater extent, interpretation, but there's been no new content).
Why? What happened? I'm most comfortable discussing the Christian texts, since I have more of a background with those - the faith was alive and breathing for a few hundred years and then... splat. It stopped.
Of course - there's still Tradition (for those of you who are Catholic) or the writings of the more prominent Christians through the ages - but none of this stuff gets appended to the existing Bible.
It's like they compiled the damn thing over a few hundred years and then... stopped.
Each faith has really shone during its time - in fact, if you look purely at membership numbers, the legacy of the "glory days" of these faiths has blessed them with worshippers in the billions.
But the core texts for these faiths have stopped... the legitimacy for change, growth and progress has been reduced to reinterpretation in the context of society.
Which is fine... but gone are the days when someone overbearing can write things to redact vestigial trappings of past dogma.
That said, I'm not without hope for the future - the various faiths obviously have relevance in today's society, and all faith denominations move on, whether they move slowly, at a medium pace or almost in keeping with the actual world.
Things will get better, and religious teachings have no choice but to stay current in one way or another - but it's just frustrating sometimes to see the lack of any new definitive texts.
