Introduction: Why This Book?
I didn't set out to write a book about destruction.
I thought I was tracing the lives of sacred texts—how they were composed, edited, translated, and canonized. And I did. That journey became Sacred Editors, a series of books exploring how human decisions shaped what we now consider divine revelation across the world's great religions. But in the process, I kept stumbling into silence. A line of scripture referenced in one source but missing from every surviving manuscript. A tradition remembered by a community but no longer found in any book. A canon that once included dozens of texts now deemed heretical, lost, or simply forgotten.
I began to wonder: What happened to the texts that didn't make it?
Some were burned deliberately—by empires, inquisitions, or reformers. Others faded slowly, abandoned as languages changed, populations scattered, or rituals ceased to be performed. Still others were silenced—suppressed not by fire or time, but by those who decided what counted as sacred, and what did not.
And yet, destruction is never the end of the story. With every loss, I found another kind of miracle: rediscovery, reconstruction, resilience. A scroll hidden in a cave for two thousand years. A chant passed down orally across a dozen generations. A single surviving copy found in a Cairo Genizah, in a Tibetan monastery, in the ashes of a Mayan temple floor.
This book tells those stories.
What This Book Is—and Isn't
This is not a catalogue of every destroyed manuscript or suppressed tradition. It's not an encyclopedia, and it doesn't aim for comprehensiveness. It's something more personal—and more urgent. A storytelling journey across the major faiths of the world (and several smaller ones), exploring how sacred texts have been lost, buried, burned, forgotten, rediscovered, and reimagined.
By "sacred texts," I mean words considered holy, authoritative, or central to religious communities—whether written in manuscripts, sung in oral traditions, performed in rituals, or remembered through collective practice. This includes not only scriptures like the Torah or Qur'an, but also liturgical chants, mystical poetry, commentary traditions, ritual instructions, and the oral teachings that often carry the deepest wisdom of faith communities.
Some stories are ancient: the Buddhist library at Nalanda set ablaze in the twelfth century, the Torah scrolls hidden during the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Gospel fragments left behind in Egyptian sands. Others span continents often overlooked in religious scholarship: Mayan codices destroyed by Spanish conquistadors, Ajami manuscripts lost across West Africa, Aboriginal songlines interrupted by colonial displacement. Still others are painfully modern: Islamic manuscripts incinerated by ISIS in Mosul, Yazidi oral traditions nearly wiped out in genocide, sacred libraries digitized and stored on servers no one controls.
Along the way, we'll meet scribes and monks, mothers and elders, digital archivists and exile communities—ordinary people who became guardians of extraordinary words. Their stories connect us to contemporary preservation heroes: the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library digitizing endangered manuscripts worldwide, UNESCO's Memory of the World project, and local communities using smartphones to record disappearing oral traditions.
You'll also encounter scholarly debates informed by leading researchers like Michael Satlow on Jewish canon formation, Annette Yoshiko Reed on apocryphal literature, and Harry Gamble on early Christian texts. Some debates concern what was actually lost. Others explore how those losses shaped belief and practice. As in my other books, I draw entirely from the work of credentialed scholars across disciplines: textual historians, archaeologists, theologians, linguists, and preservation specialists. I'm not one of them. My role is to synthesize and share their discoveries—to tell the human stories behind the sacred silences.
How the Book Is Structured
The book is divided into four parts:
- Part I: When Sacred Memory Burns explores the most dramatic moments of destruction—fires, conquests, inquisitions—and what was (and wasn't) saved when sacred libraries and traditions came under attack.
- Part II: The Quiet Extinctions focuses on losses that didn't involve flames—texts and traditions that faded through neglect, migration, technological change, or simple forgetfulness.
- Part III: Digital Salvation and Digital Apocalypse looks forward, examining the promise and peril of digital scripture. Will cloud-based Qur'an apps and digitized scrolls survive centuries to come? Or are we building sacred archives on sand?
- Part IV: Reckoning with Loss includes firsthand testimonies, ethical reflections, and a reframed scholarly roundtable—not asking "What if nothing had been lost?" but instead, "How has loss shaped what faith looks like today?"
At the end, you'll find appendices and research tools: a preservation toolkit for communities, a timeline of major recoveries, and a glossary of religious and technical terms (from canon and heresy to palimpsest and genizah). These are not just academic extras—they're meant to empower anyone who wants to help protect the sacred.
Why Now?
Because sacred memory is in danger again.
Climate change threatens monastic libraries from Bhutan to Ethiopia. Authoritarian regimes ban the public transmission of minority scriptures. Entire oral traditions are vanishing as elders pass without apprentices—a linguistic genocide as urgent as physical destruction. And while digital tools have unlocked unprecedented access to religious texts, they've also introduced new vulnerabilities: server failures, format decay, geopolitical censorship, and the slow erosion of embodied practice.
Consider this paradox: In 2011, Yahoo's closure of GeoCities erased millions of personal websites overnight. Today, the most-used digital Qur'an apps depend on the same corporate infrastructure. We are the first generation with the ability to preserve the scriptures of the world in near-totality—and the first to risk losing everything to digital rot or a company's updated terms of service.
But loss is not just tragedy. As I discovered, it is also a crucible. Out of erasure comes creativity. Out of absence, a deeper longing. The faiths of the world have endured not in spite of destruction, but because communities rose to meet it with innovation, interfaith cooperation, and fierce devotion to memory.
I hope this book helps you see those communities more clearly—and perhaps even become part of that lineage of caretakers yourself.