The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Religious Studies,
#5151
Thomas Kelly Cheyne
1841 - 1915 (74 years)
Thomas Kelly Cheyne, was an English divine and biblical critic. Biography He was born in London and educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London, and Oxford University. Subsequently, he studied German theological methods at Göttingen. He was ordained in 1864 and held a fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1868 to 1882. During the earlier part of this period he stood alone in the university as a teacher of the main conclusions of Old Testament criticism at that time. In 1881 he was presented to the rectory of Tendring, in Essex, and in 1884 he was made a member of the Old Testament revision company.
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Johann Conrad Dannhauer
1603 - 1666 (63 years)
Johann Conrad Dannhauer was an Orthodox Lutheran theologian and teacher of Spener. Dannhauer began his education in the gymnasium at Strasburg and was the master of a thorough philosophical training before he commenced his theological work in 1624. He continued his studies at Marburg, Altorf, and Jena, lecturing at the same time on philosophy and linguistics and winning recognition at Jena by his exegesis of the Epistle to the Ephesians. Returning to Strasburg in 1628, he entered upon an active career as administrator, teacher, and theologian. Made seminary inspector in 1628, he became in the...
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P. T. Forsyth
1848 - 1921 (73 years)
Peter Taylor Forsyth, also known as P. T. Forsyth, was a Scottish theologian. Biography The son of a postman, Forsyth studied at the University of Aberdeen and then in Göttingen . He was ordained into the Congregational ministry and served churches as pastor at Bradford, Manchester, Leicester and Cambridge, before becoming Principal of Hackney College, London in 1901.
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Gilbert Burnet
1643 - 1715 (72 years)
Gilbert Burnet was a Scottish philosopher and historian, and Bishop of Salisbury. He was fluent in Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Burnet was highly respected as a cleric, a preacher, an academic, a writer and a historian. He was always closely associated with the Whig party, and was one of the few close friends in whom King William III confided.
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Gottschalk of Orbais
805 - 869 (64 years)
Gottschalk of Orbais was a Saxon theologian, monk and poet. Gottschalk was an early advocate for the doctrine of two-fold predestination, an issue that ripped through both Italy and Francia from 848 into the 850s and 860s. Led by his own interpretation of Augustine's teachings on the matter, he claimed the sinfulness of human nature and the need to turn to God with a humility for salvation. He saw himself as a divine vessel calling all of Christianity to repent for decades of Civil War. His attempts of this new Christianisation of Francia ultimately failed, his doctrine was condemned as heresy at the 848 council of Mainz and 849 council of Quierzy.
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Frédéric Auguste Lichtenberger
1832 - 1899 (67 years)
Frédéric Auguste Lichtenberger was a French theologian. Biography He obtained his degree in theology, and was made professor at the University of Strasbourg . In 1877 he was appointed professor in the newly founded Protestant faculty at Paris, of which he also became dean. In 1896, he received a D.D. from the University of Glasgow.
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Ralph Cudworth
1617 - 1688 (71 years)
Ralph Cudworth was an English Anglican clergyman, Christian Hebraist, classicist, theologian and philosopher, and a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists who became 11th Regius Professor of Hebrew , 26th Master of Clare Hall , and 14th Master of Christ's College . A leading opponent of Hobbes's political and philosophical views, his magnum opus was his The True Intellectual System of the Universe .
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Edwin Lewis
1881 - 1959 (78 years)
Edwin Lewis was an American Methodist theologian primarily associated with Drew University in New Jersey. Born in Newbury, Berkshire, England, Lewis became a Methodist local preacher at the age of seventeen. In 1900 he traveled to Newfoundland, Canada as a missionary before continuing his education in the United States. He eventually became a professor of theology at Drew.
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William Benjamin Smith
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Benjamin Smith was a professor of mathematics at Tulane University, best known as a proponent of the Christ myth theory. Biography In a series of books, beginning with Ecce Deus: The Pre-Christian Jesus, published in 1894, and ending with The Birth of the Gospel, published posthumously in 1954, Smith argued that the earliest Christian sources, particularly the Pauline epistles, stress Christ's divinity at the expense of any human personality, and that this would have been implausible, if there had been a human Jesus. Smith therefore argued that Christianity's origins lay in a pre-Chri...
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Johannes Cocceius
1603 - 1669 (66 years)
Johannes Cocceius was a Dutch theologian born in Bremen. Life After studying at Hamburg and the University of Franeker, where Sixtinus Amama was one of his teachers, he became in 1630 professor of biblical philology at the Gymnasium illustre in his native town. In 1636 he was transferred to Franeker, where he held the chair of Hebrew, and from 1643 the chair of theology also, until 1650, when he succeeded the elder Friedrich Spanheim as professor of theology at the University of Leiden.
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Nathaniel Lardner
1684 - 1768 (84 years)
Nathaniel Lardner was an English theologian. Life Lardner was born at Hawkhurst, Kent in 1684. He was the elder son of Richard Lardner , an independent minister, and of a daughter of Nathaniel Collyer or Collier, a Southwark tradesman. His sister Elizabeth married Daniel Neal, who studied with Lardner in Utrecht.
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Charles Porterfield Krauth
1823 - 1883 (60 years)
Charles Porterfield Krauth was a pastor, theologian and educator in the Lutheran branch of Christianity. He is a leading figure in the revival of the Lutheran Confessions connected to Neo-Lutheranism in the United States.
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Imam Shamil
1797 - 1871 (74 years)
Imam Shamil was the political, military, and spiritual leader of North Caucasian resistance to Imperial Russia in the 1800s, the third Imam of the Caucasian Imamate , and a Sunni Muslim shaykh of the Naqshbandi Sufis.
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William Edwy Vine
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
William Edwy Vine , commonly known as W. E. Vine, was an English Biblical scholar, theologian, and writer, most famous for Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words. Life Vine was born in the second quarter of 1873, in Blandford Forum, Dorset. His father ran the Mount Radford School, which moved to Exeter in 1875, and it was in this location that Vine was raised. He became a Christian at an early age and was baptised in the Plymouth Brethren assembly in Fore Street, Exeter. At 17, Vine became a teacher at his father's school, before moving to Aberystwyth to study at the University College of Wales.
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Antipope John XXIII
1370 - 1419 (49 years)
Baldassarre Cossa was Pisan antipope John XXIII during the Western Schism. The Catholic Church regards him as an antipope, as he opposed Pope Gregory XII whom the Catholic Church now recognizes as the rightful successor of Saint Peter. He was also an opponent of Antipope Benedict XIII, who was recognized by the French clergy and monarchy as the legitimate Pontiff.
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Ezra Abbot
1819 - 1884 (65 years)
Ezra Abbot was an American biblical scholar. Life and writings Abbot was born at Jackson, Maine, April 28, 1819; son of Ezra and Phebe Abbot. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from Bowdoin College in 1840. In 1847, at the request of Andrews Norton, he went to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was principal of a public school until 1856. He was assistant librarian of Harvard University from 1856 to 1872, and planned and perfected an alphabetical card catalog, combining many of the advantages of the ordinary dictionary catalogs with the grouping of the minor topics under more general heads, which is characteristic of a systematic catalogue.
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John of Nepomuk
1340 - 1393 (53 years)
John of Nepomuk was the saint of Bohemia who was drowned in the Vltava river at the behest of King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia. Later accounts state that he was the confessor of the queen of Bohemia and refused to divulge the secrets of the confessional. On the basis of this account, John of Nepomuk is considered the first martyr of the Seal of the Confessional, a patron against calumnies and, because of the manner of his death, a protector from floods and drowning.
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Bernard Revel
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Bernard Revel was an Orthodox rabbi and scholar. He served as the first President of Yeshiva College from 1915 until his death in 1940. The Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, as well as the former Yeshiva Dov Revel of Forest Hills, are named after him.
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H. H. Rowley
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Harold Henry Rowley was an English Old Testament scholar from the Baptist tradition. Biography H. H. Rowley was born in Leicester on 24 March 1890 to Richard Rowley and Emma Rowley. The family Baptist church was Melbourne Hall, Leicester, previously led by F. B. Meyer and William F. Fullerton. These beginnings profoundly affected and formed Rowley's churchmanship, theology and missional interests. His childhood education was at Wyggeston School, Leicester. He studied at the Bristol Baptist College, gaining a B.D. and B.A. and at Mansfield College, Oxford, earning a B.Litt.
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Adolf Schlatter
1852 - 1938 (86 years)
Adolf Schlatter was a well-known Swiss-born German Protestant theologian and professor specialising in the New Testament and systematics at Greifswald, Berlin and Tübingen. Schlatter has published more than 400 scholarly and popular pieces during his academic career. In his work "The Nature of New Testament Theology. The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter", Robert Morgan writes: "Schlatter ... was considered a conservative, and is perhaps the only 'conservative' New Testament scholar since Bengel who can be rated in the same class as Baur, Wrede, Bousset and Bultmann". There ha...
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Ibn al-Rawandi
827 - 911 (84 years)
Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Ishaq al-Rawandi , commonly known as Ibn al-Rawandi , was an early Persian scholar and theologian. In his early days, he was a Mu'tazilite scholar, but then rejected the Mu'tazilite doctrine. Afterwards, he became a Shia scholar; there is some debate about whether he stayed a Shia until his death or became a skeptic, though most sources confirm his eventual rejection of all religion and becoming an atheist. Although none of his works have survived, his opinions had been preserved through his critics and the surviving books that answered him. His book with the m...
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Petrus Cunaeus
1586 - 1638 (52 years)
Petrus Cunaeus was the pen name of the Dutch Christian scholar Peter van der Kun. His book The Hebrew Republic is considered "the most powerful statement of republican theory in the early years of the Dutch Republic."
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Wilfrid
634 - 709 (75 years)
Wilfrid was an English bishop and saint. Born a Northumbrian noble, he entered religious life as a teenager and studied at Lindisfarne, at Canterbury, in Francia, and at Rome; he returned to Northumbria in about 660, and became the abbot of a newly founded monastery at Ripon. In 664 Wilfrid acted as spokesman for the Roman position at the Synod of Whitby, and became famous for his speech advocating that the Roman method for calculating the date of Easter should be adopted. His success prompted the king's son, Alhfrith, to appoint him Bishop of Northumbria. Wilfrid chose to be consecrated in G...
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Luigi Taparelli
1793 - 1862 (69 years)
Luigi Taparelli was an Italian Jesuit scholar of the Society of Jesus and counter-revolutionary who coined the term social justice and elaborated the principles of subsidiarity, as part of his natural law theory of just social order. He was the brother of the Italian statesman Massimo d'Azeglio.
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Francisco Ribera
1537 - 1591 (54 years)
Francisco Ribera was a Spanish Jesuit theologian, identified with the Futurist Christian eschatological view. Life Ribera was born at Villacastín. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1570, and taught at the University of Salamanca. He acted as confessor to Teresa of Avila. He died in 1591 at the age of fifty-four, one year after the publication of his work In Sacrum Beati Ioannis Apostoli, & Evangelistiae Apocalypsin Commentarij.
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Harry A. Ironside
1876 - 1951 (75 years)
Henry Allan "Harry" Ironside was a Canadian–American Bible teacher, preacher, theologian, pastor and author who pastored Moody Church in Chicago from 1929 to 1948. Biography Ironside was born in Toronto, Ontario, to John and Sophia Ironside, who were both active in the Plymouth Brethren. At birth, Harry was thought to be dead, so the attending nurses focused their attention on Sophia, who was dangerously ill. Only when a pulse was detected in Harry, 40 minutes later, was an attempt made to resuscitate the infant. When Harry was two years old, his father, John, died of typhoid at the age of 27.
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Gottfried Arnold
1666 - 1714 (48 years)
Gottfried Arnold was a German Lutheran theologian and historian. Biography Arnold was born at Annaberg in Saxony, Germany, where his father was schoolmaster. In 1682, he went to the Gymnasium at Gera and three years later to the University of Wittenberg. He made a special study of theology and history, and afterwards, through the influence of Philip Jacob Spener, the father of pietism, became tutor in Quedlinburg.
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Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen
1691 - 1747 (56 years)
Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen was a German-American Dutch Reformed minister, theologian and the progenitor of the Frelinghuysen family in the United States of America. Frelinghuysen is most remembered for his religious contributions in the Raritan Valley during the beginnings of the First Great Awakening. Several of his descendants became influential theologians and politicians throughout American history.
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Giuseppe Ricciotti
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Giuseppe Ricciotti was an Italian canon regular, Biblical scholar and archeologist. He is famous mainly for his book The Life of Christ edited in 1941 and reedited and reprinted several times. Life Ricciotti was born in Rome on 27 February 1890. In 1905 he entered the novitiate of the Roman Catholic religious order of the Canons Regular of the Lateran, taking religious vows the following year. After his seminary studies and completing mandatory military service, he was ordained as a priest in 1913. After ordination, Ricciotti continued his studies at the University of Rome, where he took courses in both philosophy and theology.
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Frédéric Louis Godet
1812 - 1900 (88 years)
Frédéric Louis Godet was a Swiss Protestant theologian. Biography Godet was born on 25 October 1812 in Neuchâtel. His father, Paul-Henri, who was a lawyer, died early. His mother, Eusébie née Gallot, a pious, strong and intelligent pastor's daughter, who founded a girls' school, devoted herself to his early training.
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Andreas Osiander
1498 - 1552 (54 years)
Andreas Osiander was a German Lutheran theologian and Protestant reformer. Career Born at Gunzenhausen, Ansbach, in the region of Franconia, Osiander studied at the University of Ingolstadt before being ordained as a priest in 1520 in Nuremberg. In the same year he began work at an Augustinian convent in Nuremberg as a Hebrew tutor. In 1522, he was appointed to the church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, and at the same time publicly declared himself to be a Lutheran. During the First Diet of Nuremberg , he met Albert of Prussia, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, and played an important role in converting him to Lutheranism.
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Johann Gottfried Scheibel
1783 - 1843 (60 years)
Johann Gottfried Scheibel was a German theologian and a leader of the Old Lutherans. Education and Ministry Johann Scheibel was born in Breslau, Silesia, and studied at the University of Halle from 1801 to 1804. He went on from there to be the assistant minister at St Elisabeth's Church in Breslau from 1804 to 1815, then advancing to deacon. Between 1811 and 1830 he was a professor of theology, first on an extraordinary, since 1818 on an ordinary chair, at the Silesian Frederick William's University in Breslau until he was suspended from his post.
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Henry Oldenburg
1619 - 1677 (58 years)
Henry Oldenburg was a German theologian, diplomat, and natural philosopher, known as one of the creators of modern scientific peer review. He was one of the foremost intelligencerss of 17th-century Europe, with a network of correspondents to rival those of Fabri de Peiresc, Marin Mersenne, and Ismaël Boulliau. At the foundation of the Royal Society in London, he took on the task of foreign correspondence, as the first Secretary.
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Hugh Latimer
1485 - 1555 (70 years)
Hugh Latimer was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, and later Church of England chaplain to King Edward VI. In 1555 under the Catholic Queen Mary I he was burned at the stake, becoming one of the three Oxford Martyrs of Anglicanism.
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Pierius
201 - Present (1825 years)
Pierius was a Christian priest and probably head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, conjointly with Achillas. He flourished while Theonas was bishop of Alexandria, and died at Rome after 309. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 4 November.
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Helvidius
340 - 390 (50 years)
Helvidius was the author of a work written prior to 383 against the belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary. Helvidius maintained that the biblical mention of "sisters" and "brothers" of the Lord constitutes solid evidence that Mary had normal marital relations with Joseph and additional children after the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus. He supported his opinion by the writings of Tertullian and Victorinus. Helvidius is sometimes seen as an early proto-protestant, along with Vigiliantius, Jovinian and Aerius of Sebaste.
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Ahmad Ghazali
1100 - 1126 (26 years)
Ahmad Ghazālī was a Sunni Muslim Persian Sufi mystic, writer, preacher and the head of Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad . He is best known in the history of Islam for his ideas on love and the meaning of love, expressed primarily in the book Sawāneḥ.
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Christoph Friedrich von Ammon
1766 - 1850 (84 years)
Christoph Friedrich von Ammon was a German theological writer and preacher. He was born at Bayreuth, Bavaria and died at Dresden. He studied at Erlangen, held various professorships in the philosophical and theological faculties of Erlangen and Göttingen, succeeded Franz Volkmar Reinhard in 1813 as court preacher and member of the Upper Consistory of the Church of Saxony at Dresden, retired from these offices in 1849. Seeking to establish for himself a middle position between rationalism and supernaturalism, he declared for a "rational supernaturalism," and contended that there must be a gradual development of Christian doctrine corresponding to the advance of knowledge and science.
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Adolf Kamphausen
1829 - 1910 (81 years)
Adolf Kamphausen was a German Protestant theologian. He was known for his liberal views in regard to Biblical exegesis. He was born in Solingen and educated at the University of Bonn. In 1855, as private secretary to Bunsen, he assisted him in his great Völlstandiges Bibelwerk für die Gemeinde. At the same time he was privatdocent at Heidelberg, and in 1863 he became an associate professor of theology at Bonn. In 1868 he attained a full professorship, serving as university rector in 1893/94.
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William Barclay
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
William Barclay CBE was a Scottish author, radio and television presenter, Church of Scotland minister, and Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow. He wrote a popular set of Bible commentaries on the New Testament that sold 1.5 million copies.
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Albert Barnes
1798 - 1870 (72 years)
Albert Barnes was an American theologian, clergyman, abolitionist, temperance advocate, and author. Barnes is best known for his extensive Bible commentary and notes on the Old and New Testaments, published in a total of 14 volumes in the 1830s.
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Harald Poelchau
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Harald Poelchau was a German prison chaplain, religious socialist and member of the resistance against the Nazis. Poelchau grew up in Silesia. During the early 1920's, he studied Protestant theology at the University of Tübingen and the University of Marburg, followed by social work at the College of Political Science of Berlin. Poelchau gained a doctorate under Paul Tillich at Frankfurt University. In 1933, he became a prison chaplain in the Berlin prisons. With the coming of the Nazi regime in 1933, he became am anti-fascist. During the war, Poelchau and his wife Dorothee Poelchau helped victims of the Nazi's, hiding them and helping them escape.
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James Legge
1815 - 1897 (82 years)
James Legge was a Scottish linguist, missionary, sinologist, and translator who was best known as an early translator of Classical Chinese texts into English. Legge served as a representative of the London Missionary Society in Malacca and Hong Kong and was the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford University . In association with Max Müller he prepared the monumental Sacred Books of the East series, published in 50 volumes between 1879 and 1891.
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Muhammed Hamdi Yazır
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Muhammed Hamdi Yazır also known as Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır and Elmalılı was a Turkish Maturidi theologian, logician, Qur'an translator, Qur'anic exegesis scholar, Islamic legal academic, philosopher and encyclopedist.
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Johann Baptist von Hirscher
1788 - 1865 (77 years)
Johann Baptist von Hirscher was a German Catholic theologian associated with the Catholic Tübingen school. He exerted a great influence in the areas of moral theology, homiletics, and catechetics. Life He was born in Alt-Ergarten, Bodnegg. His parents were pious peasants. He studied at Weissenau monastery school, the lyceum of Constance. The vicar general of the diocese, Ignaz Heinrich von Wessenberg became his patron. Hirscher attended the University of Freiburg and entered the seminary in Meersburg in 1809. He was ordained priest in 1810. For two years he was curate at ; in 1812 he became ...
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Johannes Stricker
1816 - 1886 (70 years)
Johannes Paulus Stricker was a Dutch theologian and biblical scholar. He attended the University of Leiden where he worked with J. F. van Oordt, a key figure in the new Groningen theology. He sat his ordination examination in May 1841, and was appointed to a ministerial post in October of that year. In December of that year, he married Willemina Carbentus, an older sister of Vincent van Gogh's mother. As an uncle he tutored the young Vincent in theology and biblical criticism in 1877–78.
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Samuel Simon Schmucker
1799 - 1873 (74 years)
Samuel Simon Schmucker was a German-American Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was integral to the founding of the Lutheran church body known as the General Synod, as well as the oldest continuously operating Lutheran seminary and college in North America .
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Johannes Andreas Quenstedt
1617 - 1688 (71 years)
Johannes Andreas Quenstedt was a German Lutheran dogmatician in the Lutheran scholastic tradition. Quenstedt was born at Quedlinburg, a nephew of Johann Gerhard. He was educated at the University of Helmstedt, 1637–43, and at the University of Wittenberg, 1644, where afterwards he lectured on geography; was adjunct professor in the philosophical faculty, 1646–49; ordinary professor of logic and metaphysics and associate professor of theology, 1649–60; and ordinary professor of theology, 1660–88 until his death.
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Gottfried Christian Friedrich Lücke
1791 - 1855 (64 years)
Gottfried Christian Friedrich Lücke was a German theologian. Luecke was born at Egeln near Magdeburg, where his father was a merchant. He studied theology at Halle and Göttingen. In 1814 he received the degree of doctor in philosophy from Halle; in 1816 he moved to the Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin, where he became licentiate in theology, and qualified as Privatdozent.
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Heinrich Julius Holtzmann
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
Heinrich Julius Holtzmann , German Protestant theologian, son of theologian Karl Julius Holtzmann , was born at Karlsruhe, where his father ultimately became prelate and counsellor to the supreme consistory of the Evangelical State Church in Baden.
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