bibliolatry

bibliolatry noun: excessive admiration for a book.

Noun (1)

bibliolatry (usually uncountable, plural bibliolatries)

(usually) Excessive admiration for a book.
(usually) Specifically, excessive reverence for, or worship of, the Bible or Qur'an, especially as taken literally.
- the danger of bibliolatry is only too apparent in the contemptuous references often made by Christian authorities to the uselessness of pagan literature since access to the Bible had been secured by the Church.1909, James Allanson Picton, Man and the Bible: A Review of the Place of the Bible in Human History, page 270
- Bibliolatry led to a phobia about swearing; rejection of the Bible made it possible again, and with it a release of the repressions which gave the Puritan middle class their moral energy.1972, Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, Folio Society, published 2016, page 164

Bibliolatry (uncountable)

Alternative letter-case form of bibliolatry (“the worship of the Bible”).
- [I]f this is the rational reverence of Protestantism,—it cannot be long before the ingenuity of our enemies compiles the annals of Bibliolatry, abounding, if not with sad impieties, yet with absurdities as numberless and as noxious as the thousand and one Mariolatries, with which our...1846 April, “Art. VIII.—The Annals of the English Bible, by Christopher Anderson. London: William Pickering. 1845. 2 vols. octavo. [book review]”, in Southern Quarterly Review, volume IX, number...
- To account the Scripture holy, and yet to deny its spiritual sense, is mere Bibliolatry; and this is the real origin of the charge of Bibliolatry so frequently made in the present day; in which point of view the charge is a just one.1867, Augustus Clissold, The Literal and Spiritual Senses of Scripture in Their Relations to Each Other and to the Reformation of the Church. […], London: Longmans, Green, & Co., […], page 63

The exponents of bibliolatry rely on the letter and make the spirit dependent on the letter1972, John Hoyles, The edges of Augustanism: the aesthetics of spirituality in Thomas Ken, John Byrom and William Law, page 97:
they are also committing "bibliolatry" by putting the Bible where God alone belongs1991, Moisés Silva, God, language, and Scripture: reading the Bible in the light of general linguistics, page 38:
"bibliolatry" (the fundamentalist insistence on the literal truth of "the Bible as the Word of God")[1992, Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, page 68:
Some sectors of the religious world have been accused […] of "bibliolatry," that is, valuing their Bible itself so highly that they are almost guilty of idolatry.2008, Michael J. Cook, Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-being in a Christian Environment, page 267:

plural	bibliolatries

From biblio- + -latry.

From Biblio- + -latry.

What does bibliolatry mean?: Bibliolatry means excessive admiration for a book.
How do you use bibliolatry in a sentence?: The exponents of bibliolatry rely on the letter and make the spirit dependent on the letter
What part of speech is bibliolatry?: Bibliolatry is a noun.
What is the plural of bibliolatry?: The plural of bibliolatry is bibliolatries.

Adapted from Wiktionary: bibliolatry (page history and authors); Bibliolatry (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “bibliolatry.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bibliolatry. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.