It would be quite interesting if all the world religions’ and philosophies’ texts could be hosted with a common format and available with an API for linking and finding parallels etc.
Maybe then run it all though GPT-3 and generate a new ideology – perhaps a bit scary as to what will come out!
One thing which ancient texts require that modern ones don’t is this: there are a lot of commentaries written about these texts. They’re crucial for understanding the original text. In fact in the Arab world commentaries on Greek and other books were sometimes as valuable as the originals. Commentaries on commentaries were common.
In the west we treat the original as sacred and everything else as secondary.
A real value for an API on a sacred text is to capture all the commentary around it, and let people upload the present say contexts in which they understand it. That would be one way to “understand” a text.
That would be a crowd-sourced encyclopedia of hermeneutics.
Call it Wikineutics.