Chapter 10: The Long Forgetting

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Texts.

"Not all scriptures are burned. Some are simply left unread."

In Part I, we witnessed sacred texts consumed by fire, shattered by conquest, or outlawed by decree. But the stories of Part II revealed a quieter form of destruction—one that unfolds not through violence, but through absence. Here, scriptures disappeared not with screams, but with shrugs.

A language faded from use. A scribe left no apprentice. A ritual ceased to be taught. Communities scattered, and with them the memory of sacred words. This is the slow unraveling of religious memory—the long forgetting.

Unlike flames or edicts, gradual abandonment is rarely recognized in the moment. A manuscript goes untranscribed one year. The next, its dialect is no longer spoken. Eventually, it becomes a curiosity in an archive—if it survives at all. This process functions like erosion. It doesn't strike. It wears away.

Jan Assmann's research on cultural memory reveals how forgetting operates as an active process rather than mere absence. "Cultural memory," he argues, "is not just about storing information but about actively choosing what to remember and what to let go." This selective process shapes religious traditions as much as deliberate preservation efforts.¹

Sacred texts fall into neglect when no one chooses to preserve them—because they are too expensive to copy, too marginal to translate, or no longer aligned with dominant theological or social values. The Tocharian Buddhist manuscripts we encountered illustrate this pattern: as Silk Road trade declined and local political systems shifted, these texts lost their institutional support. Over time, they didn't just lose relevance. They lost presence entirely.

The economic dimension of forgetting cannot be overlooked. Paul Connerton's work on social memory demonstrates how financial pressures determine which cultural knowledge survives. Medieval Christian monasteries faced similar choices when deciding which manuscripts to copy. Jewish diaspora communities prioritized legal texts over folklore. Islamic scholarly institutions favored classical works over regional commentaries. These weren't failures of memory—they were acts of cultural curation shaped by limited resources.²

Translation emerged in these chapters as both savior and betrayer. When texts survived only in Coptic, Chinese, or Latin, their core ideas were preserved—but not unchanged. A scripture rendered in another language is never a perfect mirror. It becomes shaped by the contours of the receiving culture: its grammar, its metaphors, its theological assumptions.

The Buddhist concept of śūnyatā (emptiness) acquired different connotations when translated into Chinese philosophical frameworks. Luther's addition of "alone" to his German translation of Paul reshaped Protestant theology. Coptic Christianity preserved ancient traditions but gradually adapted to Arabic cultural patterns. In each case, translation enabled survival while enabling transformation.

This process continues today through digital translation platforms that offer instant access to sacred texts across languages. Yet these tools often strip away the liturgical, cultural, and interpretive contexts that give texts their meaning within living communities. Speed of translation can come at the cost of depth of understanding.

One of the more troubling revelations in this part of the book is how often sacred texts were forgotten not by accident, but by design. Texts associated with women, the poor, mystics, or rural communities were more likely to be deemed unworthy of copying, translating, or preserving.

Aleida Assmann's research on the politics of memory shows how "canon" (referring to authoritative collections of sacred texts) and "archive" function differently: canons preserve what communities actively use, while archives store what might someday prove valuable. Many texts that disappeared were neither canonized nor archived—they existed in a liminal space of community practice that proved vulnerable to disruption.³

What survives, therefore, is often a reflection not of what was most cherished, but of what was most supported—by money, literacy, power, and orthodoxy (referring to established religious doctrine). The long forgetting becomes a mirror of cultural bias. Memory is not neutral. It is curated (meaning actively selected and maintained).

This pattern extends beyond individual texts to entire religious traditions. Mandaean communities in diaspora struggle to maintain not just their manuscripts but the ritual knowledge necessary to interpret them. Indigenous traditions worldwide face similar challenges as urbanization and language shift threaten oral transmission. African diaspora communities work to reconstruct religious practices disrupted by slavery and colonialism.

Yet some of what was forgotten does return—through archaeology, chance discovery, or digital recovery. The rediscovery of texts at Qumran, Nag Hammadi, and Gandhāra revealed previously unknown dimensions of religious development. But recovered texts do not restore lost worlds. They arrive fragmented, incomplete, and require reinterpretation.

Rediscovery is rarely restoration; it is another kind of editing—shaped by modern assumptions and agendas. We don't merely find texts. We reframe them through contemporary scholarly methods, institutional priorities, and cultural perspectives. The Dead Sea Scrolls influenced Jewish and Christian self-understanding partly because of how scholars chose to interpret and present them.

These patterns of forgetting and recovery reveal the contingent nature of what we now take for granted. The religious texts that define contemporary faiths represent not timeless essences but historical survivals shaped by countless human decisions. Understanding this process can deepen rather than threaten faith by revealing how communities have always actively participated in preserving and interpreting their sacred heritage.

The long forgetting continues today with new characteristics shaped by digital culture. Sacred songs go unrecorded when communities lack technical resources. Minority scripts are left out of OCR software, making their digitization more difficult. Liturgies in exile drift out of memory when they are no longer performed regularly. Digital platforms that host religious content can change their policies or cease operations, potentially erasing years of community work.

As with the communities of the past, these losses often happen quietly and could be prevented through deliberate action. The preservation of sacred texts today requires not only guarding against dramatic catastrophes but valuing the overlooked, sustaining the small, and choosing, again and again, not to let the sacred become irrelevant through silence.

Contemporary preservation efforts must grapple with questions that echo historical challenges: Which traditions deserve digital preservation resources? How do we maintain not just texts but the cultural knowledge necessary to understand them? Who controls access to digitized religious heritage? How do we balance preservation with respect for community autonomy?

Every religious tradition has two canons: the one it preserved and the one it left behind. Part III will explore how digital technologies create new opportunities for preservation while introducing unprecedented vulnerabilities. But first, we must remember that forgetting has always been as much a part of religious history as remembering—and that recognizing this fact may be one of the most spiritual acts of our time.

Notes

Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15-43.
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 37-61.
Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 97-123.

Notes

Further Reading