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,
#5551
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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Habakkuk
626 BC - 600 BC (26 years)
Habakkuk, or Habacuc, who was active around 612 BCE, was a prophet whose oracles and prayer are recorded in the Book of Habakkuk, the eighth of the collected twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible. He is revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
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Edwin Abbott Abbott
1838 - 1926 (88 years)
Edwin Abbott Abbott was an English schoolmaster, theologian, and Anglican priest, best known as the author of the novella Flatland . Biography Edwin Abbott Abbott was the eldest son of Edwin Abbott , headmaster of the Philological School, Marylebone, and his wife, Jane Abbott . His parents were first cousins.
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Wilhelm Herrmann
1846 - 1922 (76 years)
Johann Georg Wilhelm Herrmann was a Lutheran German theologian. Career Hermann taught at Halle before becoming professor at Marburg. Influenced by Kant and Ritschl, his theology was in the idealist tradition, seeing God as the power of goodness. Jesus was to be seen as an exemplary man. Even if Jesus never existed, according to Herrmann, his traditional portrayal was still valid. His book The Communion of the Christian God was seen as a highlight of nineteenth century Liberal Christianity, although he is also credited with preserving certain conservative ideals against liberal revisionism. ag...
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Francis Landey Patton
1843 - 1932 (89 years)
Francis Landey Patton was a Bermudan-American educator, Presbyterian minister, academic administrator, and theologian, and served as the twelfth president of Princeton University. Background, 1843–1871 Patton was born in Warwick Parish, Bermuda, to a family of Scottish descent. He attended Warwick Academy. As a child, the family relocated to Canada. Patton received collegiate education at the University of Toronto, followed by a theological education at Knox College, Toronto. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865; was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in June 1865; was ...
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Adriaan Reland
1676 - 1718 (42 years)
Adriaan Reland was a noted Dutch Orientalist scholar, cartographer and philologist. Even though he never left the Netherlands, or visited the Holy Land, he made significant contributions to Middle Eastern and Asian linguistics and cartography, including Persia, Japan and the Holy Lands.
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Marcus Jastrow
1829 - 1903 (74 years)
Marcus Jastrow was a German-born American Talmudic scholar, most famously known for his authorship of the popular and comprehensive Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Babli, Talmud Yerushalmi and Midrashic Literature. He was also a progressive, early reformist rabbi.
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J. Oliver Buswell
1895 - 1977 (82 years)
James Oliver Buswell, Jr. was a Presbyterian theologian, educator and institution builder. Education Buswell was born in Burlington, Wisconsin. He received an A.B. from the University of Minnesota , a B.D. from McCormick Theological Seminary , an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. from New York University .
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Ernst Fuchs
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Ernst Fuchs was a German New Testament theologian and a student of Rudolf Bultmann. With Gerhard Ebeling he was a leading proponent of a New Hermeneutic theology in the 20th century. Life Fuchs was born in Heilbronn on 11 June 1903 He was nurtured in the Swabian culture of Esslingen and Cannstatt and attended minor seminaries in Schoental and Urach . His student years at Tübingen and Marburg during the heyday of dialectical theology were indelibly stamped by the theology of Karl Barth, the philosophy of M. Heidegger, and the NT studies of R. Bultmann, under whom he received his doctorate at...
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Philipp Spener
1635 - 1705 (70 years)
Philipp Jakob Spener was a German Lutheran theologian who essentially founded what would come to be known as Pietism. He was later dubbed the "Father of Pietism". A prolific writer, his two main works, Pia desideria and Allgemeine Gottesgelehrtheit , were published while he was the chief pastor in the Lutheran Church at Frankfurt. In 1691, he was invited to Berlin by the court of Brandenburg. Even in Berlin, Spener was at odds with the predominant Lutheran orthodoxy, as he had been all his life. Spener influenced the foundation of the University of Halle, but the theological faculty of anoth...
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Hyrum Smith
1800 - 1844 (44 years)
Hyrum Smith was an American religious leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the original church of the Latter Day Saint movement. He was the older brother of the movement's founder, Joseph Smith, and was killed with his brother at Carthage Jail where they were being held awaiting trial.
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Archibald Alexander
1772 - 1851 (79 years)
Archibald Alexander was an American Presbyterian theologian and professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary. He served for 9 years as the President of Hampden–Sydney College in Virginia and for 39 years as Princeton Theological Seminary's first professor from 1812 to 1851.
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Arnobius
255 - 327 (72 years)
Arnobius was an early Christian apologist of Berber origin during the reign of Diocletian . According to Jerome's Chronicle, Arnobius, before his conversion, was a distinguished Numidian rhetorician at Sicca Veneria , a major Christian center in Proconsular Africa, and owed his conversion to a premonitory dream. However, Arnobius writes dismissively of dreams in his surviving book.
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Sabellius
200 - 300 (100 years)
Sabellius was a third-century priest and theologian who most likely taught in Rome, but may have been a North African from Libya. Basil and others call him a Libyan from Pentapolis, but this seems to rest on the fact that Pentapolis was a place where the teachings of Sabellius thrived, according to Dionysius of Alexandria, c. 260. What is known of Sabellius is drawn mostly from the polemical writings of his opponents.
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Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier
1718 - 1790 (72 years)
Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier was a French Catholic theologian, known for his engagement with the atheist philosophes of eighteenth-century France. Life Bergier was born at Darney in Lorraine. After a course of theology in the University of Besançon, he received the degree of doctor, was ordained priest, and went to Paris to finish his studies. Returning to Besançon in 1748, he was given charge of a parish and later became president of the college of the city, which had formerly been under the direction of the Jesuits. As a result of his bestselling polemic Deism Refuted By Itself , Bergier was released from pastoral responsibilities by the French bishops in order to write full-time.
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Peter Waldo
1140 - 1217 (77 years)
Peter Waldo was the leader of the Waldensians, a Christian spiritual movement of the Middle Ages. The tradition that his first name was "Peter" can only be traced back to the fourteenth century. This has caused some historians, such as Jana Schulman, to see it as likely a later invention. He is considered a Proto-Protestant.
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Robert Barclay
1648 - 1690 (42 years)
Robert Barclay was a Scottish Quaker, one of the most eminent writers belonging to the Religious Society of Friends and a member of the Clan Barclay. He was a son of Col. David Barclay, Laird of Urie, and his wife, Lady Katherine Barclay. Although he himself never lived there, Barclay was titular governor of the East Jersey colony in North America through most of the 1680s.
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Samuel Prideaux Tregelles
1813 - 1875 (62 years)
Samuel Prideaux Tregelles was an English biblical scholar, lexicographer, Christian Hebraist, textual critic, and theologian. Life Tregelles was born at Wodehouse Place, Falmouth, of Quaker parents, but he himself was for many years in communion with the Plymouth Brethren and then later in life became a Presbyterian . He was the son of Samuel Tregelles and his wife Dorothy and was the nephew of Edwin Octavius Tregelles. He was educated at Falmouth classical school from 1825 to 1828.
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Crawford Howell Toy
1836 - 1919 (83 years)
Crawford Howell Toy , American Hebrew scholar, was born in Norfolk, Virginia. He graduated at the University of Virginia in 1856, and studied at the University of Berlin from 1866 to 1868. From 1869 to 1879 he was professor of Hebrew in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary , and in 1880 he became professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at Harvard University, where until 1903 he was also Dexter lecturer on biblical literature.
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Nicolaas Beets
1814 - 1903 (89 years)
Nicolaas Beets was a Dutch theologian, writer and poet. He published also under the pseudonym Hildebrand. Life Nicolaas Beets was born in Haarlem, the son of a pharmacist. From 1833 till 1839 he studied theology at the university of Leiden where he received his doctorate.
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George Salmon
1819 - 1904 (85 years)
George Salmon FBA FRS FRSE was a distinguished and influential Irish mathematician and Anglican theologian. After working in algebraic geometry for two decades, Salmon devoted the last forty years of his life to theology. His entire career was spent at Trinity College Dublin.
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John A. Mackay
1889 - 1983 (94 years)
John A. Mackay was a Presbyterian theologian, missionary, and educator. He was a strong advocate of the Ecumenical Movement and World Christianity. Early life and education John A. Mackay was born on May 17, 1889, in Inverness, Scotland, the eldest of five children. The family attended the Free Presbyterian Church, a very small denomination. At the age of 14 at a communion service at Rogart, Scotland, Mackay had a profound religious experience that influenced the remainder of his life.
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