Here are the most famous well known people in human history, ranked according to Google searches and approximate number of books written about them. If you travel to Bouvet Island, the most remote land mass in the whole world, how likely is the first person you meet going to know of the following people?
Sir Isaac Newton
The discoverer of the calculus. He generalized the binomial theorem, invented the reflecting telescope, coined the word “gravity” and gave the Roman Catholic Church’s self-important hegemony over geocentrism. Scientist will forever be grateful to Sir Isaac Newton for setting the standards for modern physics.
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Google searches can be inaccurate, which is why they are only half the criteria for judgment. If you search “leonardo,” you’ll get a lot of pages about ninja turtles and people who drowned on Titanic. But if you type da Vinci’s full name, you’ll quickly see why he is world renowned. He could do anything. He has possibly the greatest resume in history. Imagine if you could put the following on yours and then make good on all of it at an interview:
He was an Engineer, inventor, anatomist, architect, mathematician, geologist, musician, cartographer, botanist, writer, sculptor. You name anything, da Vinci was into it.
William Shakespeare
The man with the lion’s share of the percentage of votes for greatest writer in English or any language in human history is sure to be the source for quite a few words and phrases now common in his native language. A good 50% of common English phrases come from the King James Bible, and possibly 30% of the rest come from the Bard. If you’ve ever said, “It’s all Greek to me;” “food for the gods;” “all that glitters is not gold;” “a sorry sight;” “dead as a doornail;” “come what may;” “with one fell swoop;” or “all’s well that ends well;” then “by Jove” you’re quoting Shakespeare.
Adolf Hitler
We all know that he remains the primary cause of WWII. He instigated it to suit two profound desires: to become the most powerful person on Earth, preferably in history, if not to rule the whole world; and, for his own enjoyment, to cause as much pain as possible against all those he deemed responsible for Germany’s humiliating and miserable defeat in WWI, and its squalid poverty between the wars.
Paul the Apostle of Tarsus
Paul is quite possibly more responsible for the dissemination of Christianity, its ideals, theology, and principles, than anyone else. He is venerated in all branches, as a saint in many, or at least as a profoundly respected teacher, preacher, and the chief Christian apologist. And he did all this via 13 letters to various churches and people throughout Asia Minor.
He was the first person to write anything that was later canonized into what we call the New Testament.
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)
You might be surprised to know that most of the people who google Buddha are not Buddhists. In the Western Hemisphere and throughout Europe, Buddhism is not as well understood as the three major monotheisms. A few clarifications:
Gautama was probably born in Kapilavastu or Lumbini, Nepal in about 563 B.C., about 24 years after Babylon sacked Jerusalem. Gautama was a mortal man who attained Nirvana, or spiritual awakening and peace of mind, at the age of 35, while seated under a Pipal tree, now referred to as the Bodhi tree, in Bodh Gaya, India. The tree growing there now was planted in 288 B.C. from a seed of the original. Buddha sat in meditation for 49 days until he attained the knowledge of how to thoroughly end suffering for all people on Earth. The people do have to follow his teaching in order to free themselves from the various griefs of life.
Moses
Moses is revered but not worshipped by all three major monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as Baha’i. He is regarded as the greatest prophet of the Old Testament; the liberator of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt; their leader into Canaan, the Promised Land; and their lawgiver, who relayed God’s commandments to the Jews, and founded much of Jewish life and tradition.
Abraham
The google searches for Abraham the Old Testament prophet are not as reliable as those for Moses or Adolf Hitler, since quite a few famous historical or fictitious people have been named Abraham. The top three most famous are Abraham of the Bible, Abraham Lincoln, and Abraham van Helsing. But if you were to go, say, the Philippines, and ask the first passerby who Abraham Lincoln was, they might actually not know. Among well over 99% of the world’s cultures and societies, you will not have that problem when asking about the prophet called Abraham.
He is revered by all three monotheisms, as well as Baha’i, as a prophet, and one of the first, if not the first, persons of the Middle East to believe in a single God. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are referred to as “the Abrahamic religions.”
AbÅ« al-QÄsim Muḥammad ibn Ê¿Abd AllÄh
To non-Muslims, Muhammad founded Islam. To Muslims, he did not found anything, because the religion, called Islam, was already there, and had to be restored to its proper maintenance. Muslims believe that Muhammad restored the religion and unified it under the philosophies God imparted to him in revelations he wrote down. These became the Q’uran. Islam is the Arabic noun for “a surrendering,” or “a yielding,” in this case to the will of Allah. Muhammad was born about A.D. 570 in Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia. He had 13 wives, which is acceptable and encouraged in Muslim cultures.
Jesus of Nazareth
There’s really no need to explain just what the four Gospels say Jesus did to become famous, but in the interest of fairness, here are the claims: he was born to a virgin, died at about the age of 33 sometime around the year A.D. 33 (plus or minus 5), the most famous victim of crucifixion, and rose from the dead on his own power 3 days later, ascended into Heaven and now sits at the right hand of God the Father as a manifestation of that God’s only offspring. You can look up the various miracles attributed to him. There are just over 7 billion people on Earth as of this list, and just about one-third precisely, 33.32%, of them, worship Jesus as “the Christ of God.” We may fairly say that these 2.33 billion people know very well who he was/is, and specifics about his life.
