Man's quest for answers for that ultimate question ("Why?") has led to many attempts to, essentially, write a Bible. I use that capitalisation with intent. Simply put, "bible" just means "book", but the word is so loaded in European culture (& elsewhere) that saying "bible" usually gets interpreted as "Bible" - a definitive book, the one & only, in a given genre.
What we're saying by applying the word "bible" to a particular book is that the book is the only one you need, in the way that Christians think of the Bible as the only religious text they need. However, too often, a book that is referred to as a bible is the work of one person or a small group, & they have worked over a relatively short period of time to produce the book - years, sometimes decades if there are collected works involved. Usually, the editor (of a collection) even shares the epoch of the works collected.
How can this be comparable to the Christian Bible? Unlike, say, the Koran, the Bible is a collection of works from many different sources over hundreds of years (from the time of St Paul's writings to the first collections of the Bishop of Alexandria & the Council of Rome) - & that's just the New Testament. The Old Testament had been mostly written from the fifth to third centuries BC.
That's a lot of collective wisdom, rewrites, rethinking, changing of basic ideas. Today, we still have a lot of trouble determining what chapters of the New Testament can be attributed to the traditional authors, & what verses have undergone changes when. This doesn't even take into consideration the various translations & copying problems that could occur over time.
When I learned to program in 'C', there was a book referred to as the "White Bible". It was a more-or-less definitive work because it was written by the originators of that programming language. There are usually definitive works for many such programming languages, but none of them hold the corpus of thought around how software is developed, or even where that language is best used. Each such book is merely the words of the language's creators, & nothing more. Hardly a "Bible". Barely a useful "bible", some thirty-seven years later.
Still, academic authors keep trying to write the definitive work in a field, & their readership expects nothing less than the definitive work to add to their personal library. Whether that's through hype on the part of publishers, or else laziness on the part of the market, what it means is that people's expectations for any given book are blown out of proportion & usually followed by some level of disappointment - or else myopia.
A book (or paper, or even a blog) should simply be seen as adding to the sum of human knowledge, not wiping out all that has gone before or else summarising the past. If an author has to criticise their predecessors to attract attention or else be controversial, then that denigrates the art of writing more than it affects the authors under attack.
If a writer contributes to society, rather than trying to dominate it or coerce it, then there's more than enough room for academic heretics to debate (not argue) multiple opposing theories on evolution, continental drift, psychiatry, the beginnings of the universe, quantum physics, the historicity of Troy or Atlantis, or even religion.
I don't feel threatened when I read a book full of ideas that don't align with mine - unless the book is badly written or sets out to attack someone else or their ideas simply for the sake of doing so. I like to read books that set out ideas that may be true, not that "have" to be.
Let me be an intelligent & discerning audience, not a a potential acolyte.
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