Really? You’re basing which book of the Bible is the most influential on how many modern movie references there are to it?
The crucifixion and resurrection alone far outweigh Revelation, as would the birth of Christ, Genesis, and the exodus out of Egypt.
Missed the edit window.
As for the second most important… I’m tempted to go with Greek philosophers here, because their line of thinking about science and philosophy went virtually unchallenged until the Enlightenment. Aristotle in particular. The best compilation would probably be the Corpus Aristotelicum.
Sage Rat, I think there is a slight misunderstanding between you and other posters. You restricted the importance of the Revelation to the literary influence it had in the Western tradition, and you may have a point there. But as I mentioned before, I was also going for general cultural impact of a work, and regarding this, I think that any of the canonical gospels is much more important than Revelation.
I’d go for something by Shakespeare, either Hamlet or MacBeth.
I’ll grant that there is some Christ imagery in modern adaptions of Superman and that the Last Supper legend of the Holy Grail influenced Arthurian lore. During the medieval ages, Morality Plays were pretty popular – but from what I’m aware the most popular ones were those with all the fire and brimstone, which would most likely get their imagery from Revelations. Dante’s Divine Comedy probably mostly draws from Revelations as does Paradise Lost.
You could say that the morality of the Bible infused Europe and so, even though specific tales weren’t incorporated all that much, the general ethos of it all permeates everything. But then we’re really talking about all of the Bible, not just a single element of it. And most of the morality of the Bible comes from the non-story stuff. That Jesus could multiply food doesn’t really effect morality. The parable of the Samaritan is fairly key to the morality, but so was the 10 commandments and a whole slew of stuff from the Old Testament, as were the epistles. And I’ll grant that that’s a reasonable argument to make. But, Revelations, as a single element that can be singled out of the Bible, is very influential on its own. Some other parables, books, and pieces have made a separate standing as well, but not to the same extent.
Slight hijack, but this always bugs me: Romeo and Juliet were not star-crossed lovers, they were damned idiots. Asimov made an excellent argument that the whole Montague/Capulet feud was on its last legs by the time the play started - for example, when Tybalt complains to Lord Capulet that Romeo is crashing their party, Lord Capulet’s response boils down to “What of it? He’s a good kid.”
Tybalt cares about the feud, and maybe a few street toughs who just enjoy a fight. But none of the adults place much stock in it - if Romeo and Juliet had just gone to their parents, they’d probably have been delighted with the opportunity to “officially” end the feud through a marriage. But these stupid kids are are besotted with the idea of a “forbidden” romance that they ruin their own chance at whatever happiness such a marriage would provide (and I think it’d fall apart), and then they can’t even handle that disappointment like sane people.
For example: there are quite some people influenced to live their life in a certain way by the gospel of Matthew.
Another: there were some not so unimportant political leaders influenced by “Das Kapital”, and not only in the way they wrote their stuff.
Uh, Sage Rage, it’s Revelation, not *Revelations *…
(And, I agree with those who say that many other parts of the Bible have been more important than Revelation.)
Anyway, two scientific works have had a significant impact:
On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, by Copernicus.
On the Origin of Species, by Darwin.
Uh, it’s not just Superman.
Have you read Paradise Lost? It’s about the fall of Man and owes an enormous amount to Genesis and virtually nothing to Revelations.
If we’re including works of nonfiction on this list, The Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? both deserve a prominent place. Whether or not you like these things, they were certainly important (the Manifesto much more so, of course). The twentieth century would have likely been very different had Marx never set pen to paper.
Plato’s dialogues have to at least be considered.
They’ve possibly had more influence on the Western world than any other work of philosophy, and unlike some other philosophers’ writings, actually count as Literature.
Not even close. There have been many thousands of times more weddings than horror movies, and a significant percentage of them have used 1 Corinthians 13 in the ceremony. That alone blows Revelation out of the water. That’s just one example.
Agreed. The Republic’s influence on the creation and evolution of Western Democracy would seem to make it ranked very highly.
I think “[The world] would have likely been very different had [piece of literature] not been written” is a great metric of what the OP seeks. If we remove this one piece of literature from the timeline, how different would the world be?
However, I can’t think of The Communist Manifesto nor What is to be Done? as literature. Nor On the Origin of Species, for that matter. And if they did count, I’d think Martin Luther’s 95 Theses or the Magna Carta might beat them.
I’ll second Don Quixote.
Those are two good suggestions. As for what counts as “literature”:
And, how many times has The Lord’s Prayer been recited?
I think that’s actually where the phrase “star-crossed” comes from, which make Romeo and Juliet the archetypal star-crossed lovers.
That last sentence is nowhere near true.
Then again, the same is true of the Bible, if you mean reading the whole thing.
Lots of good ideas here. I like including the works of Adam Smith or Marx/Engels.
Newton’s *Principia *might be up there. But how about the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution?