Working definition
Textual authority is a tradition-relative relationship among a text, a community, institutions, and practices of interpretation. The registry distinguishes a text’s documentary existence and history from its canonical, legal, liturgical, theological, or contemplative authority, which may vary within the same named tradition.
Questions this method asks
- Who recognizes the text as authoritative?
- What kind of authority is claimed?
- How has that authority changed?
Evidence inputs
- Named edition or witness
- Community or institutional statements
- Documented use in teaching, law, liturgy, or practice
Method
- Identify the authority-bearing community and period.
- Separate documentary claims from normative claims.
- Record dissenting, local, and minority positions.
What it can establish
- The documented scope of an authority claim
- Who invokes the text and for which uses
What it cannot establish
- That the text is historically accurate in every statement
- That its theological claims are universally true
Interpretive risks
- Treating scripture as self-interpreting
- Projecting one institution onto all practitioners
Mathematical connection
Formal structure without validity transfer
Attributed authority rules
Compile “community and context → authority status” records without treating status as truth.
Inputs
- Community
- Text
- Context and date
Outputs
- Applicable authority rule
- Provenance chain
- Explicit non-applicability
Limit: Formal consistency can expose contradictions but cannot confer sacred authority or establish the truth of a premise.
Methodology sources
- [1]TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange · Text Encoding Initiative Consortium
Establishes: A maintained scholarly standard for representing texts, manuscripts, witnesses, metadata, variants, editorial interventions, names, dates, and other features needed for inspectable digital editions.
Boundary: Encoding makes documentary structure and editorial decisions explicit; it does not decide which witness is original, which interpretation is correct, or whether the text’s theological claims are true.
- [2]Teacher’s Guides and Primary Source Analysis Tool · Library of Congress
Establishes: A source-analysis workflow that distinguishes observation, reflection, questioning, format, authorship, context, and further investigation across manuscripts, oral histories, printed texts, images, and other primary materials.
Boundary: Primary-source analysis establishes what a surviving artifact can support in context; it does not make the artifact complete, unbiased, representative, or factually correct merely because it is old.