Scooped me, dangit! I have a hard time choosing between that world-changing piece of paper and the Iliad. Although one could question whether the Iliad counts as “written,” I suppose. It’s informed our views on warfare, obligation, family, literature, poetry, revenge, honor, treachery, fate…heck, wasn’t there someone who said “Without Homer, nothing?”
If “The Bible” counts as one work, given its multiple authors, provenances, formats, etc, then even more so does The First Folio. So that, closely followed by On the Origin of Species.
Upon first viewing, I thought you said The Fiend Folio. I mean, yeah, I found it influential, but sheesh. :smack:
Surely you can see the flaw in this argument. All that you did was take three of the best-known symbols from the Book of Revelation and compare them to three of the lesser-known events from the Gospels. To legitimately test your hypothesis, we’d obviously have to compare the best-known things in Revelation to the best-known things in the rest of the Bible, such as the Garden of Eden, David killing Goliath, and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Are you truly willing to argue that if we did that, we’d still find that “nearly all references come from Revelations [sic]”?
On the whole, perhaps you should put some more effort into posting things that are true. That way you wouldn’t have to spend so much time on these flimsy defenses of false statements. Alternately, you could accomplish the same thing by admitting an error when you make it.
That was my point.
If we are counting collections(let alone The Bible, which has many authors), then we should include collected works, like Shakespeare’s plays.
Heck, even his sonnets are more influential than many books of the Bible. I’d bet even Christopher Marlowe’s plays are more influential than…Malachi, for example.
Well, I don’t agree that the bible was the most influential, because I have a hard time to begin with with the idea that one book has definitively had more influence than another, but I’ll toss out a couple ideas:
*Both The Iliad and The Odyssey. Homer basically popularized large-scale storytelling, not to mention provided us with the archetypical hero/hero’s journey.
*Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, without which we would have no modern philosophy.
*Euclid’s Elements (enjoy math? You owe him), which allowed Ptolemy to write the Almagest, which paved the way for Copernicus’s On The Revolutions of the Celestial Sphere. We also owe a considerable debt to Descartes’s Geometry (which technically was part of Discourse on the Method). Newton’s Principia arguably aimed to tie all that preceded him together.
*Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, Darwin’s On The Origin of Species.
*Herodotus’s Histories and Thucydides Peloponnesian War (I have literally seen two academics get red in the face with anger over who was more significant).
*Das Kapital, The Wealth of Nations, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence (not books, but important enough to count), Tocqueville’ Democracy in America, <cheating>the collected writings of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau</cheating>
*Summa Theologica, Goethe’s Faust, Dante’s Divine Comedy.
*Don Quixote, just for inventing the novel.
My 9th grade English teacher gave the best summary of it, IMO: they were two kids who were both in love with the idea of being in love, and also very very stupid. They would’ve been miserably unhappy had their families said, “eh, well, sure, go for it,” because they didn’t care about each other, they cared about the risk they thought they created.
The Origin of Species by Darwin?
I’m still sticking with Aristotle. If he hadn’t existed, and nobody else wrote what he wrote . . . I can’t imagine what our world would be like.
In fact I believe Aristotle and Plato, combined, beat the Bible.
The cultural, philosophical and political impact of many of the esteemed works being cited here is highly dubious: many are the type of work that people in ivory towers have read but almost no one else has, and which contain ideas that are dated, wrong or obvious, but which are esteemed because they happen to be written down in old books.
If we are allowed non fiction I think this is the winner.
Agreed. I think the bible is much over-rated in this context. Mostly it is just an old book that describes aspects of life and rules by which people may get along. Those things would occur today whether the bible was written or not, and have always occurred even in cultures which have never heard of the bible. Not so of Origin of Species, for example.
That’s what you think the Bible is? Wow.
Anyway, Origin of the Species definitely deserves a mention in the non-fiction category. But if we get into non-fiction and scientific works, we open a whopper of a category.
In terms of “literature”, I stick with Shakespeare’s first folio.
Well that plus a whole load of shit people made up. What else?
I don’t think I would consider that to be an example of “influence” since it is the Bible itself. 1 Corinthians 13 didn’t inspire someone to write 1 Corinthians 13. Even if you consider the overall Christian wedding ceremony to be a derivative work – rather than an excuse to quote the Bible – it only influenced whoever came up with the ceremony. And that guy was probably a preacher under the pay of the Church – so it’s not like he was influenced so much as he was commissioned.
Well “The Complete Works of” Shakespeare is worth a mention - since the old and new testament of the bible are legitimately considerable as having multiple authors…
And Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and A Tale of Two Cities (the three works you suggested yourself in post 5) aren’t “shit people made up?”
Of course they are. Are they important shit? As I said at the outset, until you define “important” for the purpose of the question it’s hard to give an answer. If you are going by what influences people, which was what I was considering at my post 5 then I think the fiction I named has a shot. So does the Bible, and I didn’t say otherwise at post 5. I left the OP’s assumption that it was No. 1 unchallenged.
If on the other hand one is thinking about “important” in the sense of describing an empirical and seriously heavyweight realisation about the nature of the world, then Origin of Species I see as a real contender, and the Bible not so much because a lot of it is just descriptive, or alternatively supernatural shit that someone made up.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear but let’s face it many of the posters in this thread are very ready to say what they think to be “important” works of literature but are pretty damn thin when it comes to saying what “important” even means to them for the purposes of this question.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson Damn bats.
If we break it down to literary traditions, after the Bible I’d say Classical literature is number two. For one thing, it’s the only tradition shared by the entire Western world; we may all know Shakespeare and Don Quixote, but non-Spanish speakers don’t usually know much about Spanish art and culture of the period the way they’re familiar with Greece and Rome. I think only modern mass-media (esp. film and tv) comes close, and it has nowhere near the time depth to penetrate into philosophy and culture.
Of Greco-Roman lit., I think Homer’s Iliad is a good choice. I think NinjaChick is overstating the case when she says it “provided us with the archetypical hero / hero’s journey” – those already existed in oral tradition. He (assuming you believe Homer was a distinct historical person) did provide a literary model for epic literature, though, and the epic hero. Dante and Milton are directly inspired by Homer. The heroic tradition continues into medieval Romance, and even Don Quixote is a send-up of it.
The scouring powder, Ajax, comes from the Iliad; how many other works of literature are naming household cleaning products two thousand years later?
I assumed most influential would mean the most influential in literature. I don’t have a problem lumping films in with that, but not weddings and prayers or whatever.
I do know that we take Biblical allusions for granted. I knew a Hindu girl at school who was originally from India, and she was always horribly confused in her literature classes. We always had to explain the Biblical allusions to her. I wish I could be more specific, but it’s too close to bed time.
Makes me want to start a line of Gilgamesh™ Pot Scrubber cleaning brushes. 
I’m not sure what the latter has to do with anything, since a great deal of what we consider the world’s best, most inspired art was done on commission from the church. But anyway, I’ll bet if you took every biblically-influenced horror movie ever made, plus every piece of biblically-influenced horror fiction (which, by the way, in my experience relies as much on the Old Testament - think The Exorcist, etc. - for inspiration as anything in Revelation) and compared it to the amount of “inspirational literature” published in this country alone in the past 20 years, it would amount to a fraction of the total of the inspirational literature.