Abstract

Religions place different priorities on textual traditions, and it is necessary to be aware that not every text plays an important role in religion is a “Sacred Book.” But it is beyond doubt that Sacred Books play an important role in the history of religions, as often they were taken as undisputed sources for studying religions with a “constitutive” significance for the religion in question. Despite of this, there always have been tensions between “writing” and the effectiveness of the spoken word.A trans-regional distribution of Sacred Books began long before the modern age of globalization, as processes of translating and spreading such texts or books were necessary when a religion started to expand from its original area to other regions. This also made it necessary to interpret Sacred Books in a new cultural context; therefore, the spreading of religions and globalization challenges hermeneutic processes. The more a Sacred Book is known not only to specialists, but also to the public, the more also the normativity and the exclusiveness sometimes become relative. This also leads to a change of religions in modern times.