ABSTRACT
The academic study of religion, however, tends to implicitly retain the older meaning of the term, since the great majority of the documents studied in the field are primarily those that can loosely be called scriptural, but now expanded to include other genres of the texts. Indeed, the era’s desire to create such translations and the critical editions of the religious texts, especially those of other cultures, has played a large role in the field, and especially during the time of the classical orientalism, which seems safe to include as a precursor to the field. While a critical scholar surely welcomes the movement away from the assumption that what the scholars have usually the termed texts (i.e., written documents) are the sole repository of the religion, it would not seem enough to say that the body is like a text.
