The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Religious Studies,
#5351
Francis Turretin
1623 - 1687 (64 years)
Francis Turretin was a Genevan-Italian Reformed scholastic theologian. Turretin is especially known as a zealous opponent of the moderate Calvinist theology of the Academy of Saumur . He was an earnest defender of the Calvinistic orthodoxy represented by the Synod of Dort, and as one of the authors of the Helvetic Consensus, which defended the formulation of predestination from the Synod of Dort and the verbal inspiration of the Bible.
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Gottlieb Christoph Adolf von Harless
1806 - 1879 (73 years)
Gottlieb Christoph Adolf von Harless , was a German Lutheran theologian. Life He was born on 21 November 1806 in Nuremberg. As a youth, he was interested in music and poetry, and was attracted by ancient and German classical literature, especially by Jean Paul. He was indifferent to Christianity. In 1823 he entered the University of Erlangen, at first studying philology, then law; but he finally tried theology. The teacher who particularly influenced him was Georg Benedikt Winer.
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Dietrich von Hildebrand
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Dietrich Richard Alfred von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and religious writer. Hildebrand was called "the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church" by Pope Pius XII. He was a leading philosopher in the realist phenomenological and personalist movements, producing works in every major field of philosophy, including ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, social philosophy, and aesthetics. Pope John Paul II greatly admired the philosophical work of Hildebrand, remarking once to his widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicist...
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John Gill
1697 - 1771 (74 years)
John Gill was an English Baptist pastor, biblical scholar, and theologian who held to a firm Calvinistic soteriology. Born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, he attended Kettering Grammar School where he mastered the Latin classics and learned Greek by age 11. He continued self-study in everything from logic to Hebrew, his love for the latter remaining throughout his life.
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Nicholas Wiseman
1802 - 1865 (63 years)
Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman was a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who became the first Archbishop of Westminster upon the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850.
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Barlaam of Seminara
1290 - 1348 (58 years)
Barlaam of Seminara , c. 1290–1348, or Barlaam of Calabria was a Basilian monk, theologian and humanistic scholar born in southern Italy. He was a scholar and clergyman of the 14th century, as well as a humanist, philologist and theologian.
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Theophanes the Confessor
759 - 817 (58 years)
Theophanes the Confessor was a member of the Byzantine aristocracy who became a monk and chronicler. He served in the court of Emperor Leo IV the Khazar before taking up the religious life. Theophanes attended the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 and resisted the iconoclasm of Leo V the Armenian, for which he was imprisoned. He died shortly after his release.
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Friedrich von Bodelschwingh
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Friedrich "Fritz" von Bodelschwingh , also known as Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Younger, was a German pastor, theologian and public health advocate. His father was Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Elder , founder of the v. Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel charitable foundations.
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Caspar René Gregory
1846 - 1917 (71 years)
Caspar René Gregory was an American-born German theologian. Life Gregory was born to Mary Jones and Henry Duval Gregory in Philadelphia. He was the brother of the American zoologist Emily Ray Gregory. After completing his bachelor's degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1864, he studied theology at two Presbyterian seminaries: in 1865–1867 at the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, and in 1867–1873 at the Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1873, he decided to continue his studies at the University of Leipzig under Constantin von Tischendorf, to whose work on textual criticism of the New Testament he had been referred by his teacher Ezra Abbot.
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William Miller
1782 - 1849 (67 years)
William Miller was an American Baptist minister who is credited with beginning the mid-19th-century North American religious movement known as Millerism. After his proclamation of the Second Coming did not occur as expected in the 1840s, new heirs of his message emerged, including the Advent Christians , the Seventh-day Adventists and other Adventist movements.
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Increase Mather
1639 - 1723 (84 years)
Increase Mather was a New England Puritan clergyman in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and president of Harvard College for twenty years . He was influential in the administration of the colony during a time that coincided with the notorious Salem witch trials.
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Judas Maccabeus
Judah Maccabee was a Jewish priest and a son of the priest Mattathias. He led the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire . The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah commemorates the restoration of Jewish worship at the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BCE, after Judah Maccabee removed all of the statues depicting Greek gods and goddesses and purified it.
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Theophan Prokopovich
1681 - 1736 (55 years)
Feofan/Theophan Prokopovich was a Russian Imperial Orthodox theologian, writer, poet, mathematician, and philosopher of Ukrainian origin. Rector of the Academia Mohileana in Kiev , and Archbishop of Novgorod. He elaborated upon and implemented Peter the Great's reform of the Russian Orthodox Church. Prokopovich wrote many religious verses and some of the most enduring sermons in the Russian language.
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Jean Daniélou
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou was a French Jesuit and cardinal, an internationally well known patrologist, theologian and historian and a member of the Académie française. Biography Early life and studies Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou was born on 14 May 1905 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was the son of Charles Daniélou and Madeleine Clamorgan. His father was an anticlerical politician who several times as a minister served in the French government, while his mother was a Catholic educator and the founder of institutions for women's education. His brother Alain was a noted Indologist and historian.
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Fausto Sozzini
1539 - 1604 (65 years)
Fausto Paolo Sozzini, or simply Fausto Sozzini , was an Italian Renaissance humanist and theologian, and, alongside his uncle Lelio Sozzini, founder of the Nontrinitarian Christian belief system known as Socinianism. His doctrine was developed among the Polish Brethren in the Polish Reformed Church between the 16th and 17th centuries, and embraced by the Unitarian Church of Transylvania during the same period.
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Paul Gerhardt
1607 - 1676 (69 years)
Paul Gerhardt was a German theologian, Lutheran minister and hymnodist. Biography Gerhardt was born into a middle-class family at Gräfenhainichen, a small town between Halle and Wittenberg. His father died in 1619, his mother in 1621. At the age of fifteen, he entered the Fürstenschule in Grimma. The school was known for its pious atmosphere and stern discipline. The school almost closed in 1626 when the plague came to Grimma, but Paul remained and graduated from there in 1627. In January 1628 he enrolled in the University of Wittenberg. There, two teachers in particular had an influence on him: Paul Röber and Jacob Martini.
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Klaas Schilder
1890 - 1952 (62 years)
Klaas Schilder was a Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian and professor in the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and later in the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands . Schilder was born into a national church family in Kampen, the Netherlands; the family joined the Gereformeerde Kerken when he was a child. After graduating from a Reformed gymnasium , he took his theological studies at the Theological University of the Reformed Churches in Kampen and graduated cum laude in 1914. Schilder was a pastor at Ambt-Vollenhove, Vlaardingen, Gorinchem, Delft, Oegstgeest, and Rotterdam-Delfshaven. Duri...
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Willibrord
658 - 739 (81 years)
Willibrord was an Anglo-Saxon missionary and saint, known as the "Apostle to the Frisians" in the modern Netherlands. He became the first Bishop of Utrecht and died at Echternach, Luxembourg. Early life His father, named Wilgils or Hilgis, was styled by Alcuin as a Saxon of Northumbria. Newly converted to Christianity, Wilgils entrusted his son as an oblate to the Abbey of Ripon, and withdrew from the world, constructing a small oratory, near the mouth of the Humber, dedicated to Saint Andrew. The king and nobles of the district endowed him with estates until he was at last able to build a c...
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Heinrich Paulus
1761 - 1851 (90 years)
Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus was a German theologian and critic of the Bible. He is known as a rationalist who offered natural explanations for the biblical miracles of Jesus. Career Paulus was a professor of theology and oriental languages at the University of Jena , then professor at the University of Würzburg . He spent time in Bamberg, Nürnberg and Ansbach before becoming professor of exegesis and church history at the University of Heidelberg , where he was instrumental in hiring Hegel in 1816. His theological rationalism greatly influenced Hegel's own theology.
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Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann
1810 - 1877 (67 years)
Johannes Christian Konrad von Hofmann was a Lutheran professor of systematic and historical theology. Biography He was born on 21 December 1810 at Nuremberg, and studied theology and history at the University of Erlangen. In 1829 he went to Berlin, where he heard lectures by Schleiermacher, Hegel, Hengstenberg, Neander, and Ranke. The latter almost persuaded Hofmann to focus entirely upon secular history rather than Christian theology. Other figures who had an influence on his faith and thinking included Christian Krafft, a Reformed pastor and associate professor of theology at Erlangen, and...
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Claude Montefiore
1858 - 1938 (80 years)
Claude Joseph Goldsmid Montefiore, also Goldsmid–Montefiore or just Goldsmid Montefiore was the intellectual founder of Anglo-Liberal Judaism and the founding president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature and New Testament. He was a significant figure in the contexts of modern Jewish religious thought, Jewish-Christian relations, and Anglo-Jewish socio-politics, and educator. Montefiore was President of the Anglo-Jewish Association and an influential anti-Zionist leader, who co-founded the anti-Zionist League of British Jews in 1917.
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Edward Robinson
1794 - 1863 (69 years)
Edward Robinson was an American biblical scholar known for his magnum opus, Biblical Researches in Palestine, the first major work in Biblical Geography and Biblical Archaeology, which earned him the epithets "Father of Biblical Geography" and "Founder of Modern Palestinology."
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August Hlond
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
August Hlond, SDB was a Polish Salesian prelate who served as Archbishop of Poznań and Gniezno and as Primate of Poland. He was later appointed as Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw and was made a cardinal of the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI in 1927.
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Alexander Altmann
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Alexander Altmann was an Orthodox Jewish scholar and rabbi born in Kassa, Austria-Hungary . He emigrated to England in 1938 and later settled in the United States, working productively for a decade and a half as a professor within the Philosophy Department at Brandeis University. He is best known for his studies of the thought of Moses Mendelssohn, and was indeed the leading Mendelssohn scholar since the time of Mendelssohn himself. He also made important contributions to the study of Jewish mysticism, and for a large part of his career he was the only scholar in the United States working on this subject in a purely academic setting.
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Sergius of Radonezh
1314 - 1392 (78 years)
Sergius of Radonezh was a spiritual leader and monastic reformer of medieval Russia. Together with Seraphim of Sarov, he is one of Eastern Orthodoxy's most highly venerated saints in Russia. Early life The date of his birth is unclear: it could be 1314, 1319, or 1322. His medieval biography states that he was born to Kiril and Maria, a boyar family, near Rostov , on the spot where now stands.
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Rabbi Meir
101 - 200 (99 years)
Rabbi Meir was a Jewish sage who lived in the time of the Mishnah. He was one of the Tannaim of the fourth generation . He is the third most frequently mentioned sage in the Mishnah and is mentioned over 3,000 times in the Babylonian Talmud. His wife Bruriah is one of the few women cited in the Gemara.
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Maisie Ward
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Mary Josephine "Maisie" Ward Sheed , who published under the name Maisie Ward, was a writer, speaker, and publisher. Maisie's brother Leo Ward was co-founder of the publishing house Sheed and Ward; Maisie took his place when Leo left to become a priest.
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Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers was a French Dominican theologian and, later in life, a Traditionalist Catholic bishop who supported sedevacantism and sedeprivationism and was excommunicated by the Holy See.
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Heinrich Ewald
1803 - 1875 (72 years)
Georg Heinrich August Ewald was a German orientalist, Protestant theologian, and Biblical exegete. He studied at the University of Göttingen. In 1827 he became extraordinary professor there, in 1831 ordinary professor of theology, and in 1835 professor of oriental languages. In 1837, as a member of the Göttingen Seven, he lost his position at Göttingen on account of his protest against King Ernst August's abrogation of the liberal constitution, and became professor of theology at the University of Tübingen. In 1848, he returned to his old position at Göttingen. When Hanover was annexed by Prussia in 1866, Ewald became a defender of the rights of the ex-king.
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N. F. S. Grundtvig
1783 - 1872 (89 years)
Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig , most often referred to as N. F. S. Grundtvig, was a Danish pastor, author, poet, philosopher, historian, teacher and politician. He was one of the most influential people in Danish history, as his philosophy gave rise to a new form of nationalism in the last half of the 19th century. It was steeped in the national literature and supported by deep spirituality.
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Theophilus Lindsey
1723 - 1808 (85 years)
Theophilus Lindsey was an English theologian and clergyman who founded the first avowedly Unitarian congregation in the country, at Essex Street Chapel. Lindsey's 1774 revised prayer book based on Samuel Clarke's alterations to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer inspired over a dozen similar revisions in the succeeding decades, including the prayer book still used by the United States' first Unitarian congregation at King's Chapel, Boston.
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Allard Pierson
1831 - 1896 (65 years)
Allard Pierson was a Dutch theologian, historian, and art historian. He was a leading proponent of radical criticism in the Netherlands. Life Pierson's father was a merchant in Amsterdam, his mother an author of pietist works. The Walloon-origin family was prominent in the Christian revival movement of the Reveil and attended the meetings of Isaac da Costa and Nicolaas Beets. Pierson studied theology at Utrecht University, where he was influenced by Opzoomer. He became a Protestant minister in Leuven in 1854, and in 1857 in the Walloon church in Rotterdam, where he was highly esteemed. Howeve...
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Cornelius Jansen
1585 - 1638 (53 years)
Cornelius Jansen was the Dutch Catholic bishop of Ypres in Flanders and the father of a theological movement known as Jansenism. Biography He was born of humble Catholic parentage at Acquoy , the Netherlands. In 1602 he entered the University of Leuven, then in the throes of an ideological conflict between the Jesuit – or scholastic – party and the followers of Michael Baius, who swore by St. Augustine. Jansen ended by attaching himself strongly to the latter "Augustinian" party, and presently made a momentous friendship with a like-minded fellow-student, Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, afterwa...
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Michael Schmaus
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Michael Schmaus was a German Roman Catholic theologian specializing in dogmatics. Life Schmaus was born in Oberbaar, Bavaria. He was ordained a priest in 1922 and got his doctorate in Catholic Dogmatic Theology under Martin Grabmann in 1924.
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John Murray
1741 - 1815 (74 years)
John Murray was one of the founders of the Universalist denomination in the United States, a pioneer minister and an inspirational figure. Early life He was born in Alton, Hampshire , in England on December 10, 1741. His father was an Anglican and his mother a Presbyterian, both strict Calvinists, and his home life was attended by religious severity. In 1751 the family settled near Cork, Ireland. In 1760 Murray returned to England and joined George Whitefield's congregation; but embracing, somewhat later, the Universalistic teachings of Welsh minister James Relly he was excommunicated. In 177...
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Young Oon Kim
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Young Oon Kim was a leading theologian of the Unification Church and its first missionary to the United States. Career Kim was a professor of religion at Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea. After she joined the Unification Church, church founder Sun Myung Moon sent her to the United States as a missionary in January 1959. In the 1960s, while a missionary in Oregon and California, she worked to promote Unification Church theology to mainstream Christian churches. She was also the first person to translate the Divine Principle, the basic textbook of Unification Church teaching, from Korean to English.
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Hugo Rahner
1900 - 1968 (68 years)
Hugo Karl Erich Rahner was a German Jesuit theologian and ecclesiastical historian. He was Dean and president of the University of Innsbruck and the elder brother of the famous theologian Karl Rahner.
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Wilhelm Stählin
1883 - 1975 (92 years)
Wilhelm Stählin was a German Lutheran theologian, bishop, preacher and one of the major initiators of the Liturgical Movement in German Protestantism in the 20th Century. After completing his school education in Augsburg Stählin began studying theology in 1901 in Erlangen, Rostock and Berlin. In 1905 he completed this theological examinations and served afterwards as a vicar in Bavaria. After a trip to England in 1908 Stählin became a parish pastor in Egloffstein and married. In 1913 he received his doctorate at the University of Marburg. His dissertation dealt with the problem of biblical metaphors.
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Alois Hudal
1885 - 1963 (78 years)
Alois Karl Hudal was an Austrian bishop of the Catholic Church, based in Rome. For thirty years, he was the head of the Austrian-German congregation of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome and, until 1937, an influential representative of the Catholic Church in Austria.
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M. L. Andreasen
1876 - 1962 (86 years)
Milian Lauritz Andreasen , was a Seventh-day Adventist theologian, pastor and author. He was one of the Seventh-day Adventist church's most prominent theologians during the 1930s and 1940s. Andreasen held to the belief that Christians can overcome sin, known popularly as Last Generation Theology, controversial for its views on atonement and salvation. Andreasen became well known for his protests against Seventh-day Adventist church leaders during the last years of his life.
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Lancelot Andrewes
1555 - 1626 (71 years)
Lancelot Andrewes was an English bishop and scholar, who held high positions in the Church of England during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. During the latter's reign, Andrewes served successively as Bishop of Chichester, of Ely, and of Winchester and oversaw the translation of the King James Version of the Bible . In the Church of England he is commemorated on 25 September with a lesser festival.
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Quadratus of Athens
100 - 129 (29 years)
Saint Quadratus of Athens was a Greek Apostolic Father, bishop of Athens. He is counted among the Seventy Apostles in the tradition of the Eastern Churches. Ministry According to the early church historian Eusebius of Caesarea he is said to have been a disciple of the Apostles .
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Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette
1780 - 1849 (69 years)
Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette was a German theologian and biblical scholar. Life and education Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette was born 12 January 1780 in Ulla , Thuringia, where his father was a pastor. As a boy, he was sent to the gymnasium at the nearby city of Weimar. Here he was much influenced by Johann Gottfried von Herder, who frequently examined at the school. In 1799, de Wette entered the University of Jena to study theology, his principal teachers being J. J. Griesbach and H. E. G. Paulus. By the time he submitted his dissertation in September 1804, he was in regular contact...
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Louis Finkelstein
1895 - 1991 (96 years)
Louis Finkelstein was a Talmud scholar, an expert in Jewish law, and a leader of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Conservative Judaism. Biography Louis Finkelstein was born into a rabbinic family in Cincinnati on June 14, 1895. He moved with his parents to Brooklyn, New York as a youngster and graduated from the City College of New York in 1915. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1918 and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America the following year. He joined the JTS faculty in 1920 as an instructor in Talmud and went on to serve as an associate professor and professor of theology.
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Karl Schwarz
1812 - 1885 (73 years)
Karl Schwarz was a German Protestant theologian. Life Birth and early life He was born at Wiek, Rügen. His father, Theodor Schwarz, pastor at Wiek, was well known as a preacher, and as the writer of a number of popular works under the pseudonym "Theodor Melas".
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Walter Bauer
1877 - 1960 (83 years)
Walter Bauer was a German theologian, lexicographer of New Testament Greek, and scholar of the development of Early Christianity. Life Bauer was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, and raised in Marburg, where his father was a professor. He studied theology at the universities of Marburg, Strassburg, and Berlin. Bauer taught at Breslau and Göttingen, where he later died.
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Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
1490 - 1573 (83 years)
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was a Spanish humanist, philosopher, and theologian of the Spanish Renaissance. He is mainly known for his participation in a famous debate with Bartolomé de las Casas in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550–1551. The debate centered on the legitimacy of the conquest and colonization of America by the Spanish Empire and on the treatment of the Native Americans. The main philosophical referents of Ginés de Sepúlveda were Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roman law and Christian theology. These influences allowed him to argue for the cultural superiority and domination of the Spani...
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Johannes Bugenhagen
1485 - 1558 (73 years)
Johannes Bugenhagen , also called Doctor Pomeranus by Martin Luther, was a German theologian and Lutheran priest who introduced the Protestant Reformation in the Duchy of Pomerania and Denmark in the 16th century. Among his major accomplishments was organization of Lutheran churches in Northern Germany and Scandinavia. He has also been called the "Second Apostle of the North".
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Johann Jakob Herzog
1805 - 1882 (77 years)
Johann Jakob Herzog , was a Swiss-German Protestant theologian. Herzog studied theology at the University of Basel and Berlin, earning his doctorate at the University of Basel in 1830. In 1835-1846 he was a professor of historical theology at the Academy in Lausanne. Afterwards he served as a professor in Halle, and eventually , he settled at Erlangen as a professor of church history.
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C. F. W. Walther
1811 - 1887 (76 years)
Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther was a German-American Lutheran minister. He was the first president of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod and its most influential theologian. He is commemorated by that church on its Calendar of Saints on May 7. He has been described as a man who gave up his homeland for the freedom to speak freely, to believe freely, and to live freely, by emigrating from Germany to the United States.
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