History's 100 Most Influential People: Catholic Christianity is Number One Influence, Bar None!

Below is the copy of a webpage of adherents.com, (Mormon?), taken from a 1992 publication (noted below). A hundred runners up are also listed, also among whom Catholicism is the greatest religion.

The order of rank in the list is patently wrong at least in that Jesus Christ is listed third on the list, only after Muhammad and Isaac Newton! Clearly an error at least for the fact that both Muhammad and Newton themselves were heavily influenced by Jesus Christ's historical heritage; and therefore, any influence they have on history is surely also indebted to Christ!

N.B. Many other minor details of the survey are also clearly biased exaggerations (e.g. that Cortes destroyed the Aztec civilization? What about the Aztec blood of the vast majority of the 100 million Mexicans today. Or does one assume that a culture is destroyed when it becomes Catholic. Mexico converted, it was not at all destroyed but enabled to flourish but its new found and beloved religion which so naturally complimented and purified the best elements of the primitive pagan religions). The striking undeniable reality is that Catholicism has an undeniably illustrious past, present and future! every one (even the demons) must admit that! Praise be Jesus Christ!
All of this being said, one must also consider that this is all from the 21st Century Western Civilization vantage point.
The Asian Civilization(s) would certainly produce a quite different list, the universal historical influence of which must be largely contested because of the limited influence Asian culture has on the West, even today!

Religious Affiliation	% in List
Catholic	31%
Anglican/Episcopalian	13%
Jewish	7%
Atheist	6%
Greco-Roman paganism	6%
Chinese traditional religion/Confucianism	5%
Lutheran	5%
Russian Orthodox	4%
pre-Nicene Christianity	3%
Platonism	3%
Islam	2%
Hindu	2%
Buddhist	2%
Presbyterian	2%
Zoroastrian	2%
Manicheanism	2%
Quaker	2%
Unitarian/Universalist	2%
Calvinist	2%
Jain	1%
Jansenist	1%
United Brethren	1%
Congregationalist	1%
Dutch Reformed	1%
Egyptian paganism	1%
Mongolian shamanism	1%
Taoism	1%
Baptist	1%
Sandemanian	1%
Protestant (denomination unknown)	6%
unknown	5%

The following list of influential figures from world history comes from Michael H. Hart's book The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. In the book, Hart provides brief biographies of each of the individuals, as well as reasons for their ranking.

Adherents.com takes no position regarding the validity of Hart's rankings. Certainly ranking the relative historical influence of individuals is a subjective process. We welcome and will by happy to post comments from readers suggesting alternative rankings or names of influential individuals who should be included in the "Top 100." (Please send suggestions to webmaster@adherents.com).

This list of names and their ranks are solely the work of Michael H. Hart. The columns "Religious Affiliation" and "Influence" are the work of Adherents.com. We will readily modify notes if there are any inaccuracies.

Note that many influential philosophies (such as Marxist Communism or Confucianism) are not always classified as organized "religions" in the traditional sense, but are classified as such by sociologists because they are a primary motivational worldview for individuals, cultures or subcultures. Also, many founders never considered themselves adherents of philosophies or religions which later bore their name (e.g., Martin Luther and Lutheranism).

In the table below, where there are two religions listed, the first one is the religion the person was born into. The second was the religion or philosophy the person later joined or founded. Comments in the "Influence" column are in bold when the influence is mainly in the realm of religion and philosophy. 

Rank	Name	Religious Affiliation	Influence
1	Muhammad	Islam	Prophet of Islam; conqueror of Arabia; Hart recognized that ranking Muhammad first might be controversial, but felt that, from a secular historian's perspective, this was the correct choice because Muhammad is the only man to have been both a founder of a major world religion and a major military/political leader. More
2	Isaac Newton	Anglican (rejected Trinitarianism, i.e., Athanasianism; believed in the Arianism of the Primitive Church)	physicist; theory of universal gravitation; laws of motion
3	Jesus Christ *	Judaism; Christianity	founder of Christianity
4	Buddha	Hinduism; Buddhism	founder of Buddhism
5	Confucius	Confucianism	founder of Confucianism
6	St. Paul	Judaism; Christianity	proselytizer of Christianity
7	Ts'ai Lun	Chinese traditional religion	inventor of paper
8	Johann Gutenberg	Catholic	developed movable type; printed Bibles
9	Christopher Columbus	Catholic	explorer; led Europe to Americas
10	Albert Einstein	Jewish	physicist; relativity; Einsteinian physics
11	Louis Pasteur	Catholic	scientist; pasteurization
12	Galileo Galilei	Catholic	astronomer; accurately described heliocentric solar system
13	Aristotle	Platonism / Greek philosophy	influential Greek philosopher
14	Euclid	Platonism / Greek philosophy	mathematician; Euclidian geometry
15	Moses	Judaism	major prophet of Judaism
16	Charles Darwin	Anglican (nominal); Unitarian	biologist; described Darwinian evolution, whichhad theological impact on many religions
17	Shih Huang Ti	Chinese traditional religion	Chinese emperor
18	Augustus Caesar	Roman state paganism	ruler
19	Nicolaus Copernicus	Catholic (priest)	astronomer; taught heliocentricity
20	Antoine Laurent Lavoisier	Catholic	father of modern chemistry; philosopher; economist
21	Constantine the Great	Roman state paganism; Christianity	Roman emperor who completely legalized Christianity, leading to its status as state religion. Convened the First Council of Nicaea that produced the Nicene Creed, which rejected Arianism (one of two major strains of Christian thought) and established Athanasianism (Trinitarianism, the other strain) as "official doctrine."
22	James Watt	Presbyterian (lapsed)	developed steam engine
23	Michael Faraday	Sandemanian	physicist; chemist; discovery of magneto-electricity
24	James Clerk Maxwell	Presbyterian; Anglican; Baptist	physicist; electromagnetic spectrum
25	Martin Luther	Catholic; Lutheran	founder of Protestantism and Lutheranism
26	George Washington	Episcopalian	first president of United States
27	Karl Marx	Jewish; Lutheran; Atheist; Marxism/Communism	founder of Marxism, Marxist Communism
28	Orville and Wilbur Wright	United Brethren	inventors of airplane
29	Genghis Khan	Mongolian shamanism	Mongol conqueror
30	Adam Smith	Liberal Protestant	economist; philosopher; expositor of capitalism; author: The Theory of Moral Sentiments
31	Edward de Vere a.k.a. William Shakespeare	Catholic; Anglican	literature; also wrote 6 volumes about philosophy and religion
32	John Dalton	Quaker	chemist; physicist; atomic theory; law of partial pressures (Dalton's law)
33	Alexander the Great	Greek state paganism	conqueror
34	Napoleon Bonaparte	Catholic (nominal)	French conqueror
35	Thomas Edison	Congregationalist; agnostic	inventor of light bulb, phonograph, etc.
36	Antony van Leeuwenhoek	Dutch Reformed	microscopes; studied microscopic life
37	William T.G. Morton	??	pioneer in anesthesiology
38	Guglielmo Marconi	Catholic and Anglican	inventor of radio
39	Adolf Hitler	Nazism; born/raised in, but rejected Catholicism	conqueror; led Axis Powers in WWII
40	Plato	Platonism / Greek philosophy	founder of Platonism
41	Oliver Cromwell	Puritan (Protestant)	British political and military leader
42	Alexander Graham Bell	Unitarian/Universalist	inventor of telephone *
43	Alexander Fleming	Catholic	penicillin; advances in bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy
44	John Locke	raised Puritan (Anglican); Liberal Christian	philosopher and liberal theologian
45	Ludwig van Beethoven	Catholic	composer
46	Werner Heisenberg	Lutheran	a founder of quantum mechanics; discovered principle of uncertainty; head of Nazi Germany's nuclear program
47	Louis Daguerre	??	an inventor/pioneer of photography
48	Simon Bolivar	Catholic (nominal); Atheist	National hero of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia
49	Rene Descartes	Catholic	Rationalist philosopher and mathematician
50	Michelangelo	Catholic	painter; sculptor; architect
51	Pope Urban II	Catholic	called for First Crusade
52	'Umar ibn al-Khattab	Islam	Second Caliph; expanded Muslim empire
53	Asoka	Buddhism	king of India who converted to and spread Buddhism
54	St. Augustine	Greek state paganism; Manicheanism; Catholic	Early Christian theologian
55	William Harvey	Anglican (nominal)	described the circulation of blood; wroteEssays on the Generation of Animals, the basis for modern embryology
56	Ernest Rutherford	??	physicist; pioneer of subatomic physics
57	John Calvin	Protestant; Calvinism	Protestant reformer; founder of Calvinism
58	Gregor Mendel	Catholic (Augustinian monk)	Mendelian genetics
59	Max Planck	Protestant	physicist; thermodynamics
60	Joseph Lister	Quaker	principal discoverer of antiseptics which greatly reduced surgical mortality
61	Nikolaus August Otto	??	built first four-stroke internal combustion engine
62	Francisco Pizarro	Catholic	Spanish conqueror in South America;defeated Incas
63	Hernando Cortes	Catholic	conquered Mexico for Spain; through war and introduction of new diseases he largelydestroyed Aztec civilization
64	Thomas Jefferson	Episcopalian; Deist	3rd president of United States
65	Queen Isabella I	Catholic	Spanish ruler
66	Joseph Stalin	Russian Orthodox; Atheist; Marxism	revolutionary and ruler of USSR
67	Julius Caesar	Roman state paganism	Roman emperor
68	William the Conqueror	Catholic	laid foundation of modern England
69	Sigmund Freud	Jewish; atheist; Freudian psychology/psychoanalysis	founded Freudian school of psychology/psychoanalysis (i.e., the "religion of Freudianism")
70	Edward Jenner	Anglican	discoverer of the vaccination for smallpox
71	Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen	??	discovered X-rays
72	Johann Sebastian Bach	Lutheran; Catholic	composer
73	Lao Tzu	Taoism	founder of Taoism
74	Voltaire	raised in Jansenism; later Deist	writer and philosopher; wrote Candide
75	Johannes Kepler	Lutheran	astronomer; planetary motions
76	Enrico Fermi	Catholic	initiated the atomic age; father of atom bomb
77	Leonhard Euler	Calvinist	physicist; mathematician; differential and integral calculus and algebra
78	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	born Protestant; converted as a teen to Catholic; later Deist	French deistic philosopher and author
79	Nicoli Machiavelli	Catholic	wrote The Prince (influential political treatise)
80	Thomas Malthus	Anglican (cleric)	economist; wrote Essay on the Principle of Population
81	John F. Kennedy	Catholic	U.S. President who led first successful effort by humans to travel to another "planet"
82	Gregory Pincus	Jewish	endocrinologist; developed birth-control pill
83	Mani	Manicheanism	founder of Manicheanism, once a world religion which rivaled Christianity in strength
84	Lenin	Russian Orthodox; Atheist; Marxism/Communism	Russian ruler
85	Sui Wen Ti	Chinese traditional religion	unified China
86	Vasco da Gama	Catholic	navigator; discovered route from Europe to India around Cape Hood
87	Cyrus the Great	Zoroastrianism	founder of Persian empire
88	Peter the Great	Russian Orthodox	forged Russia into a great European nation
89	Mao Zedong	Atheist; Communism; Maoism	founder of Maoism, Chinese form of Communism
90	Francis Bacon	Anglican	philosopher; delineated inductive scientific method
91	Henry Ford	Protestant	developed automobile; achievement in manufacturing and assembly
92	Mencius	Confucianism	philosopher; founder of a school of Confucianism
93	Zoroaster	Zoroastrianism	founder of Zoroastrianism
94	Queen Elizabeth I	Anglican	British monarch; restored Church of England to power after Queen Mary
95	Mikhail Gorbachev	Russian Orthodox	Russian premier who helped end Communism in USSR
96	Menes	Egyptian paganism	unified Upper and Lower Egypt
97	Charlemagne	Catholic	Holy Roman Empire created with his baptism in 800 AD
98	Homer	Greek paganism	epic poet
99	Justinian I	Catholic	Roman emperor; reconquered Mediterranean empire; accelerated Catholic-Monophysite schism
100	Mahavira	Hinduism; Jainism	founder of Jainism

Source of list of names: Hart, Michael H. The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, Revised and Updated for the Nineties. New York: Carol Publishing Group/Citadel Press; first published in 1978, reprinted with minor revisions (reflected above) in 1992.

Religious Affiliation of History's 100 Most Influential People
- Overflow Page -

The 100: The Most Influential Persons in History
Runners Up

From: Michael H. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, 1978; pages 517-518:

While this book was being written, many friends and associates of the author suggested suggested the names of various historical figures who they felt might reasonably be included in the main section of the book.

Quite a few of those suggestions were adopted; others, for one reason or another, were rejected. Below are the names of a hundred interesting figures who, the author finally concluded, do not belong among the 100 most influential persons in history -- although, undoubtedly, strong arguments can be made on behalf of a considerable number of these persons.

On the succeeding pages are brief articles about ten of those figures, indicating the author's reasons for omitting them from the top hundred. It should not be assumed that the author thinks that those ten (in some order) would be numbers 101-110 if the main list were extended, or that the persons named below would be numbers 100-200.

[The 100 runners-up in this afterword are first listed alphabetically, followed by brief chapters of 10 of the individuals, who we have listed first below.]

Rank	Name	Religious Affiliation	Influence
RU	St. Thomas Aquinas	Catholic	influential early Christian philosopher
RU	Archimedes	Greek philosophy	father of experimental science
RU	Charles Babbage	Anglican	mathematician and inventor of forerunner of computer
RU	Cheops	Egyptian paganism	Egyptian ruler; builder of Great Pyramid
RU	Marie Curie	Catholic (lapsed)	physicist; radioactivity
RU	Benjamin Franklin	Presbyterian; Deist	American politician and inventor
RU	Mohandas Gandhi	Hinduism; influenced by Jainism (mother was a Jain)	Indian leader and Hindu religious reformer
RU	Abraham Lincoln	Regular Baptist (childhood); later ambiguous - Deist, general theist or a very personalized Christianity	16th president of U.S.; led during Civil War
RU	Ferdinand Magellan	Catholic	navigator; named Pacific Ocean; first circumnavigation of globe
RU	Leonardo da Vinci	Catholic	artist; inventor

Abraham
Aesop
Howard H. Aiken
Susan B. Anthony
St. Thomas Aquinas
Archimedes
Aristarchus of Samos
Neil Armstrong
Charle Babbage
Jeremy Bentham
Otto von Bismark
Robert Boyle
Louis de Broglie
Nicolas Sadi Carnot
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
Cheops (Khufu)
Chu Hsi
Winston Churchill
Karl von Clausewitz
Rudolf Clausius
Marie Curie
Gottlieb Daimler
Dante Alighieri
Darius the Great
King David
Democritus
Mary Baker Eddy
Robert C.W. Ettinger
Henry Ford
George Fox
Benjamin Franklin
Frederick the Great
Betty Friedan
Galen
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Karl Friedrich Gauss
Hammurabi
Han Wu Ti
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Henry VIII
Henry the Navigator
Theodor Herzl
Hippocrates
Thomas Hobbes
James Hutton
Ikhnaton
Isaiah
Joan of Arc
Joseph Marie Jacquard
Immanuel Kant
John Maynard Keynes
Har Gobind Khorana
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Alfred C. Kinsey
Kublai Khan
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Etienne Lenoir
Leonardo da Vinci
Abraham Lincoln
Liu Pang (Han Kao Tsu)
Louis XIV
James Madison
Ferdinand Magellan
The Virgin Mary
Meiji Tenno (Emperor Mutsuhito)
Sultan Mohammed (Mehmed) II
Montesquieu
Maria Montessori
Samuel Morse
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Muawiya I
Gerard K. O'Neill
Blaise Pascal
Ivan Pavlov
Marco Polo
Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus)
Pythagoras
Rembrandt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Sankara
Sargon of Akkad
Erwin Schrodinger
William B. Shockley
Joseph Smith
Socrates
Sophocles
Sun Yat-sen
William Henry Fox Talbot
Tamerlane
T'ang T'ai Tsung
Edward Teller
Henry David Thoreau
Leo Tolstoy
Charles H. Townes
Harry S. Truman
Selman A. Waksman
James D. Watson
Mary Wollstonecraft
Frank Lloyd Wright
Vladimir Zworykin