I had a lot of the same questions. After entering Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and Wagner, I thought that, while I love Brahms and he was undoubtedly a master of the Romantic era, perhaps he simply wasn’t influential enough. But when I saw I some composers on the list who make Offenbach look influential and important, I emailed the makers of the list. They said that there was an error in their data collection method that missed a few people who should clearly be in the Pantheon set, including Brahms. I assume this explains some of the other puzzling omissions.

I also asked how they decided if a person was “real”. They said that they didn’t deliberately decide — they used the Freebase data set and accepted anyone with a “date of birth, place of birth, and cultural domain”. No matter what criteria you use, including or excluding religious figures will be controversial. I would question whether a default birthdate of 3500 BC should be considered a true birthdate.

Whether or not you think they belong on the list, if you are going to include the religious figures, 3500 BC is still an unsatisfactory birth date for many of these figures. If he was a real person, Judas would have been about the same age as Jesus, not 3500 years older. They told me they are working to align contemporaries when possible, which returns us to the question about the birthdate as part of the inclusion criteria for these figures.