All the Holy People is a book in progress, and this site is its working register. Dr. Ben Soffer set the idea, the scope and the standard. The research and this site were produced with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent, running teams of AI researchers under that standard. You should know that when you weigh what you read here.
The steps
- A written standard. Before any research began, we fixed the rules for sources, grades, quotes and images.
- Researchers by tradition. Separate AI agents worked each group of people and opened each source they cited.
- A register of registers. One researcher mapped how each tradition lists its holy people.
- A records sweep. A checklist of 14 kinds of record was run for every person, including birth, marriage, death, military, court, census and newspapers. A record that could not be found is logged as not found.
- One scoring pass. A single reviewer scored every event, so the same rubric reaches every religion.
- Automated checks. A validator tests each card for missing fields, broken source links inside the card, and over-long quotes.
Scope
The main book covers people who died in 1600 or later, because that is where records can be gathered. Joan of Arc is the one exception, as the prologue, for the sake of her trial transcripts. Early prophets are left out. Only people who have died are included.
What this has not been
No human historian has reviewed these cards yet. Some sources were read only through a summary, a transcription or a reference work, and the cards say so where they can. Many archive files need a request in person or by letter, and those are listed as such. Treat this as a research draft and check originals before citing.
The numbers today
40 people · 183 events · 371 sources · 547 records traced · 172 saved copies · 94 images · 78 registers
The technology
The cards are plain JSON files. A Python script builds static HTML pages, which are served from Amazon S3 through CloudFront. There are no accounts, no cookies and no analytics.