5
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)
c. 563–c. 483 B.C.
Google searches: 4 million+ per month
Number of books: c. 7 million
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.
This is called the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right concentration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, and right mindfulness. If you hold to all these, you will be able to put away all worries and you will be truly happy and unaffected by anything. Buddha rejected the notion of any literature being infallible, and argued that truth must be experienced to be known.
Gautama, the Supreme Buddha, is worshipped in Hinduism as well, as one of the ten representations of Vishnu, who is the god above all others. Baha’i also venerates Gautama as a mortal manifestation of God, who descended to teach mankind to love one another and how to be happy. Gautama is traditionally said to have died in about 411 B.C., at the age of 150 or so. Modern scholars place his death at about 483, at the age of 80.
4
Moses
c. 1300–c. 1180 B.C.
Google searches: 2.7 million+ per month
Number of books: c. 8 million
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.
The Pharaoh’s daughter, usually named Bithiah, found the infant Moses in a basket floating in the Nile and took him as her own son. She named him after the Hebrew verb “to draw,” since she drew him out of the river. No information is given on Moses’s life, except that he was raised in the Egyptian noble household, and that one day he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave and saved the Hebrew by killing the Egyptian. He then hid in the wilderness, and met Jethro, who was a follower of the precursor faith to Islam.
Jethro gave him Zipporah, his daughter, to be his wife, and Moses met God for the first time, who showed himself in the form of a burning bush. Moses then bravely returned to Egypt and, with God’s help, forced the Pharaoh to let his people go. Moses was about 80 years old when this Exodus began. They wandered the desert wilds for 40 more years, received God’s law through Moses, built an ark into which the law was placed, and finally reached a land flowing with milk and honey, which God promised them. Moses, however, had acted arrogantly when he struck the stone from which water sprang for the Israelites, and so God refused to allow him entrance into Canaan. Moses died at 120 years and God buried him in the Moab valley opposite Mount Nebo. There is a memorial to him there today.
3
Abraham
c. 1812–c. 1637 B.C.
Google searches: 9.1 million+ per month
Number of books: c. 2 million
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.” In the Bible, God makes a covenant with Abraham because of his devout, unswerving faith in God, while everyone around him follows the newest god to take everyone’s fancy. This covenant is marked by circumcision. God then tests the conviction of Abraham’s faith in him by demanding that he kill his firstborn son, Isaac, to glorify God. Abraham does not hesitate, but takes Isaac up to the top of a mountain and is about to kill him when an angel arrives and tells him to stop. God is immensely impressed and blesses Abraham with fruitfulness: he will be the father of many nations.
Today, Abraham is precisely that. Muslims believe that it was not Isaac, but Ishmael, his other son, whom God told Abraham to sacrifice, and Muslims believe that Ishmael’s lineage led to the next entry. The site of the near sacrifice is traditionally deemed to be where the Dome of the Rock sits today. This shrine is sacred to all three Abrahamic religions.
2
Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh
c. A.D. 570–632
Google searches: 13.6 million+ per month
Number of books: incalculable
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.
Muhammad’s status as second most famous person in history is especially remarkable given that it is illegal according to Islamic law to depict Muhammad in any way (which is why you don’t see him in the above picture). That law dictates that Muhammad is the last prophet to have been sent by God to teach mankind the ways of peace and righteousness, and that he is too holy to be viewed by our sinful eyes. For this reason, very few films have been made about him. The most notable was The Message (1977), the premiere of which incited suicide bombings throughout the Middle East and protests around the world, until everyone realized that Muhammad is not actually depicted; rather, the camera’s point of view represents him: the film is seen through his eyes.
If you’d like to know, there is nothing in the Q’uran that states, “To kill Americans, both civil and military, is the duty of every Muslim who is able.” That nonsense was concocted by various Middle Eastern leaders over the years, mostly in the last half of the 20th Century and beyond. These leaders know full well that knowledge is power and have done their level best to hoard literacy education from the public. The literacy rate in Yemen is currently about 70%, which is terrible compared to “more civilized” countries like the USA, England, Germany, and Japan. And because the Middle Eastern Muslim public largely cannot read the Q’uran, the governments disseminate anti-American, anti-Western lies to indoctrinate them into hatred.
Muhammad died on 8 June A.D. 632 in Medina, Saudi Arabia, having united the whole of the Middle East under a single God, whose name is Allah. There are many spellings of Muhammad, including Mohammed, Moammar, Mehmet, Mahomet, and others. Because of him, Muhammad is the most common given name in the world, with about 200 million carriers. “Muhammad” means “praised.”
If you anticipated Muhammad, you probably anticipated the next entry.
1
Jesus of Nazareth
c. 5 B.C.–c. A.D. 28
Google searches: 24.9 million+ per month
Number of books: incalculable
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.
It is also indisputable that those followers of Islam and Judaism both know perfectly well who he was. There are some 1.75 billion Muslims on Earth today, or 25% of the global population, and since Jesus is venerated as a very important prophet of their religion, to whom they say Muhammad spoke when he sprang to Heaven on a horse, Jesus is certainly not unknown to them. There are about 1.3 billion atheists the world over, and at least 98% of those people certainly know all about Jesus. It is highly possible that the only people on Earth who have no idea who he was, or anything about him, are those people who belong to the 100 or so primitive, uncontacted tribes remaining around the world, the most well known across the Internet of which are the Envira people of the Brazilian-Peruvian border area, deep in the Amazon Jungle. They have been photographed from helicopter. It is doubtful they know of Jesus, or Muhammad, or anyone else on this list, as they are 100% isolated from the rest of the world’s societies.
Google claims that 129,864,880 books have been written and bound throughout human history and which still survive in book form in some library in the world. That is not as high a number as you might have expected, but we are speaking of different volumes, so only one of the 25 million copies of the Bible printed every single year counts toward this total. Out of these c. 130 million books, it is estimated that 40% are about Jesus. This percentage includes books about Christianity in general, whether evangelical (or anti-evangelical) or historical. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion focuses on God in general, but pays special attention to Christianity, as any atheist apology must, since Christianity is the most popular religion, and thus Dawkins’s book counts as 1 book about Jesus, as it counts as 1 book about Muhammad. So there are some 52 million different books circulating the world right now that are in some way concerned with Jesus, the man who may have lived, who may have walked on water, and risen from the dead. The Gospel of John, one of the 52 million books written about Jesus, ends with this passage: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”
Just missed the cut (many): Confucius, Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Jack the Ripper, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and more.
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