Scripture and canon

Scripture names texts ascribed special status; canon names the cut—what counts and why—often stabilized slowly through councils, curriculum, memorization chains, and political power. Protestants classically distinguished sola scriptura from Catholic and Orthodox webs of tradition; Jewish communities balance Written and Oral Torah; Islam centers Qur’anic recitation while hadith corpora complicate the picture; Hindu “scripture” sprawls across śruti and smṛti without one Protestant-style closure.

Conceptually, canon raises hermeneutics: literal, allegorical, legal, mystical; and raises authority: who may interpret, who is corrected, who speaks in God’s idiom.

Outdeus treats scripture-canon as an authority-and-meaning concept—where communities negotiate permanence and change without pretending texts are read raw.