> Most religious books that have stood the test of time have lived up to the hype.
They really haven't. Not a single one of them. There is, however, organized religion around them that has twisted those book to mean whatever it is that brings the flock.
Are they influential? Yes. Have they stood the test of time? Hell, no
Yes pure garbage, the book of Job, the Psalms, the Ecclesiastes, the sermon of the mountain, the Sefer Yetzirah, the Popol Vuh, the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching...garbage,garbage, garbage.
For a good chunk of history, wasn't the bible about the only book you could buy in Europe?
Separating the social structures around the bible from the book and trying to talk about it as if it is a product following the same rules as Tom Clancy's next novel is gross and laughable.
It is estimated that around 5 billion copies of the Bible were sold and distributed throughout history. [1] This has happened over the course of over two thousand years. Which makes it less popular than Harry Potter (120 million copies of the first book in 20 years) or Twilight.
And that 5 billion number includes a very significant chunk of bibles which are just distributed through various religious centers (same goes for all other religious texts).
And, of course, the number of books sold says literally nothing about whether a book has stood the test of time.
That’s not really a great comparison, considering that the printing press didn’t exist for ~1,500 of those years and a mass market didn’t exist for ~1700 of them.
There's no organised institution around Harry Potter. For most part the past 2000 years the Bible was probably the only book most people in the Western World saw or had. It was a required attribute of school curriculum. It was a required book to have at home etc.
None of that makes the Bible "stand the test of time" or make it popular in the same sense as Harry Potter is popular. Compare Bible's "popularity" to Quotations from the Works of Mao Zedong (emphasis mine) [1]:
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It has been reported that 800 million copies of the red-covered booklet Quotations from the Works of Mao Zedong (Tse-tung) were sold or distributed between June 1966, when possession became virtually mandatory in China, and September 1971, when its promoter Marshal Lin Biao died in an air crash.
--- end quote ---
I doubt any significant number of Bibles are actually sold anymore (especially in what's called "developed world"), but are distributed via churches or other religious organisations. Gideon distributes 50 million bibles per year [2]. Most available statistics talk about "printed" or "distributed" when talking about number of bibles sold which is definitely not the same.
For example [3] (emphasis mine):
--- start quote ---
The Bible is by far the worlds best-selling book of all time. No other book, fact or fiction, even comes close. Most estimates place the number of Bibles printed each year at over 100 million. 20 million Bibles are sold each year in the United States alone.
--- end quote ---
The United States is quite religious, and it still only manages ~20 million books per year for a population of ~400 million people. This number will be significantly smaller in less religious countries, and higher in more religious countries. But once again it hardly makes it popular in the same sense as Harry Potter is popular.
And, of course, once you make more and more books available to people, you will inevitably have smaller numbers of those books sold, but a greater number of them in total. There are 650 million books sold in the US each year. [4] There are 300 thousand new titles each year [5]
But yeah, the Bible is "popular" because it's pushed through an organised religion and has for centuries been a required reading for everyone (for everyone who could read that is, as literacy was scarce at best). And even today it's possible that most bibles go to the same people ("The average American Christian owns 9 Bibles and wants to purchase more" [2])
Among Christians hardly anyone reads the Bible except for a number easy passages. And those passages are invariably in the New Testament. The Old Testament is an unknown quantity to the vast number of Christians. I doubt anyone knows the story of Job or Noah except through what preachers tell them.
The Bible a huge book of ancient texts with little structure and inscrutable context that is as alien to a modern person as Mesopotamic cuneiform. Ah, yes, inhabitants of Maktesh, and son of Pethuel, and Cyrus king of Persia, and Sheshbazzar, and... what's for dinner?
They really haven't. Not a single one of them. There is, however, organized religion around them that has twisted those book to mean whatever it is that brings the flock.
Are they influential? Yes. Have they stood the test of time? Hell, no