Bibles
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
THE SEVEN, the seven principal Bibles of the world are the Koran of the Mohammedans, the Eddas of the Scandinavians, the Tripitikes of the Buddhists, the Five Kings of the Chinese, the three Vedas of the Hindus, the Zend Avesta and the Scriptures of the Christians. The Koran is, except the Eddas, the most recent of these seven Bibles and not older than the 7th century of our era. It is a compound of quotations from the Old and New Testafrom the old the Gospelstar ments, the Talmud and the Gospel of dinavians was first published in the 14th century. The Tripitikes of the Buddhists contain sublime morals and pure aspirations, but their author lived and died in the 6th century before Christ. The sacred writings of the Chinese are called the Five Kings, king meaning web of cloth or the warp that keeps the threads in their place. They contain the best sayings of the best sages on the ethico-political duties of life. These sayings cannot be traced to a period higher than the 11th century before Christ. The three Vedas are the most ancient books of the Hindus, and it is the opinion of Max Müller, Wilson, Johnson and Whitney that they are not older than 11 centuries before Christ. The Zend Avesta of the Persians is the grandest of all these sacred books next to our Bible. Zoroaster, whose sayings it contains, was born in the 12th century before Christ. BIBLIA PAUPERUM (Bible of the poor), the name for block books common in the Middle Ages, and consisting of a number of rude pictures of Biblical subjects with short explanatory text accompanying each picture.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's 1921 list of "the seven Bibles of the world" is a Victorian framing that scholars abandoned long ago; comparative religion now treats each scripture on its own terms rather than ranking them against "our Bible." Several of its particulars have also shifted: there are four Vedas, not three, and the Rigveda is now generally placed around 1500-1200 BC rather than the eleventh century BC; the Eddas were written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century, Snorri's Prose Edda about 1220; and Zoroaster's dates remain genuinely disputed, with estimates ranging over several centuries. The description of the Koran as "a compound of quotations" from Jewish and Christian sources reflects a polemical strain of nineteenth-century Orientalism that modern scholarship, and Muslim readers, do not accept. For the Christian scriptures themselves the largest single event since 1921 was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls from 1947, which pushed the oldest Hebrew biblical manuscripts back by roughly a thousand years.
Written for this edition, 2026.