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,
#5651
Geert Groote
1340 - 1384 (44 years)
Gerard Groote , otherwise Gerrit or Gerhard Groet, in Latin Gerardus Magnus, was a Dutch Catholic deacon, who was a popular preacher and the founder of the Brethren of the Common Life. He was a key figure in the Devotio Moderna movement.
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Edward Beecher
1803 - 1895 (92 years)
Edward Beecher was an American theologian, the son of Lyman Beecher and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. Biography Beecher was born August 27, 1803, in East Hampton, New York. He graduated from Yale College in 1822. After this, he studied theology at Andover Theological School.
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Cleland Boyd McAfee
1866 - 1944 (78 years)
Cleland Boyd McAfee was an American theologian, Presbyterian minister and hymn writer, best known for penning the gospel hymn, "Near to the Heart of God," and its tune called "McAfee". He wrote the song after the concurrent deaths of two of his young nieces, caused by diphtheria. He also is believed to be the creator of the acronym TULIP, which represents the Five Points of Calvinism.
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Francis Brown
1849 - 1916 (67 years)
The Rev. Francis Brown American Semitic scholar, was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was the son of Samuel Gilman Brown , president of Hamilton College from 1867 to 1881, and the grandson of Francis Brown, whose removal from the presidency of Dartmouth College and later restoration were incidental to the famous Dartmouth College case.
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Naftali Herz Tur-Sinai
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Naftali Herz Tur-Sinai was a Bible scholar, author, and linguist instrumental in the revival of the Hebrew language as a modern, spoken language. Tur-Sinai was the first president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language and founder of its Historical Dictionary Project.
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Andrews Norton
1786 - 1853 (67 years)
Andrews Norton was an American preacher and theologian. Along with William Ellery Channing, he was the leader of mainstream Unitarianism of the early and middle 19th century, and was known as the "Unitarian Pope". He was the father of the writer Charles Eliot Norton.
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Joachim Lütkemann
1608 - 1655 (47 years)
Joachim Lütkemann was a German Lutheran theologian and writer of devotional literature. Life Joachim Lütkemann was the son of Samuel Lütkemann, an apothecary from Demmin who had become mayor, and his wife Katharina, née Zander. After attending school in Demmin, he went to university in Greifswald in 1624, then in 1626 to the Marienstiftsgymnasium in Stettin. From 1629–1634he then studied philosophy and theology at the University of Strasbourg, where he was especially influenced by the teachings of Johann Conrad Dannhauer and Johann Schmidt, and later by those of Philipp Jakob Spener. After a ...
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Gustav Adolf Deissmann
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Gustav Adolf Deissmann was a German Protestant theologian, best known for his leading work on the Greek language used in the New Testament, which he showed was the koine, or commonly used tongue of the Hellenistic world of that time.
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John Charles McQuaid
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
John Charles McQuaid, C.S.Sp. , was the Catholic Primate of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin between December 1940 and January 1972. He was known for the unusual amount of influence he had over successive governments.
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Claus Harms
1778 - 1855 (77 years)
Claus Harms was a German clergyman and theologian. Life Harms was born at Fahrstedt in Schleswig, and in his youth worked in his father's mill. At the University of Kiel he repudiated the prevailing rationalism and under the influence of Schleiermacher became a fervent Evangelical preacher, first at Lunden , and then at Kiel .
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Valentin Ernst Löscher
1673 - 1749 (76 years)
Valentin Ernst Löscher was a German orthodox Lutheran theologian. At the University of Wittenberg, where his father was professor of theology, he gave his attention mainly to philology and history, but out of respect to his father's wish he selected a theological subject for his master's dissertation, in which he opposed the Pietistic position. Subsequent study at Jena aroused his interest in church history. During travels undertaken at this time he formed the acquaintance of a number of influential anti-Pietistic theologians. In 1696 he began to lecture at Wittenberg on the origin of Deism and Pietism.
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Benedict Welte
1805 - 1885 (80 years)
Benedict Welte was a German Catholic exegete. After studying at Tübingen and Bonn, where he made special studies in the exegesis of the Old Testament and in Oriental languages, he was ordained priest when twenty-eight years old. Soon after this he became assistant lecturer at Tübingen, and in 1840 regular professor of Old Testament exegesis.
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Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange was a French Dominican friar, philosopher and theologian. Garrigou-Lagrange was a neo-Thomist theologian, recognized along with Édouard Hugon and Martin Grabmann as distinguished theologians of the 20th century. As professor at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, he taught dogmatic and spiritual theology in Rome from 1909 to 1959. There he wrote The Three Ages of the Interior Life in 1938.
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Noah Porter
1811 - 1892 (81 years)
Noah Thomas Porter III was an American Congregational minister, academic, philosopher, author, lexicographer and an outspoken anti-slavery activist. Porter Mountain, of the Adirondack Mountains, was named for him after he was the first to climb it in 1875. He was President of Yale College .
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Muhammad Ahmad
1844 - 1885 (41 years)
Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah bin Fahal was a Sudanese religious and political leader. In 1881, he claimed to be the Mahdi, and led a successful war against Egyptian rule in Sudan which culminated in a remarkable victory over them in the Siege of Khartoum. He created a vast Islamic state extending from the Red Sea to Central Africa, and founded a movement that remained influential in Sudan a century later.
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Cosmo Gordon Lang
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
William Cosmo Gordon Lang, 1st Baron Lang of Lambeth, was a Scottish Anglican prelate who served as Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury . His elevation to Archbishop of York, within 18 years of his ordination, was the most rapid in modern Church of England history. As Archbishop of Canterbury during the abdication crisis of 1936, he took a strong moral stance, his comments in a subsequent broadcast being widely condemned as uncharitable towards the departed king.
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Hans Asmussen
1898 - 1968 (70 years)
Hans Christian Asmussen was a German Evangelical and Lutheran theologian. Asmussen was a pastor in Altona, Hamburg. He was removed from office by the Nazis because of his activity in the Reich Fraternal Council of the Confessing Church. He was jailed several times before 1945. He was co-author of the protest "Word and Affirmation of Altona Pastors amid the Misery and Confusion of Public Life" , which rejected a pact with National Socialism and thus became a preliminary step toward the theological declaration of the Barmen Confessional Synod. From 1945 to 1948, Asmussen presided over the E...
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Adalbert Merx
1838 - 1909 (71 years)
Adalbert Merx was a German Protestant theologian and orientalist. Biography He studied at the University of Jena, where he became an associate professor in 1869. Subsequently, he was a full professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen, and in 1873 a professor of theology at the University of Giessen. From 1875 till his death he was a professor of theology of the University of Heidelberg. In the course of his researches he made several journeys in the East.
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Michael Sars
1805 - 1869 (64 years)
Michael Sars was a Norwegian theologian and biologist. Biography Sars was born in Bergen, Norway. He studied natural history and theology at Royal Frederick University from 1823 and completed a cand.theol. degree in 1828. For several years he taught at a number of different schools, firstly in Christiania and then in Bergen. In 1831 he was appointed vicar to Kinn Church on the Norwegian north-west coast; eight years later he transferred to Manger, just north of Bergen. Finally, in 1854 he was named professor of zoology at the University of Oslo where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1869.
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Saint Christopher
300 - 251 (-49 years)
Saint Christopher is venerated by several Christian denominations as a martyr killed in the reign of the 3rd-century Roman emperor Decius , or alternatively under the emperor Maximinus Daia . There appears to be confusion due to the similarity in names "Decius" and "Daia". Churches and monasteries were named after him by the 7th century.
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Albert of Saxony
1316 - 1390 (74 years)
Albert of Saxony was a German philosopher and mathematician known for his contributions to logic and physics. He was bishop of Halberstadt from 1366 until his death. Life Albert was born at Rickensdorf near Helmstedt, the son of a farmer in a small village; but because of his talent, he was sent to study at the University of Prague and the University of Paris.
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Harald Høffding
1843 - 1931 (88 years)
Harald Høffding was a Danish philosopher and theologian. Life Born and educated in Copenhagen, he became a schoolmaster, and ultimately in 1883 a professor at the University of Copenhagen. He was strongly influenced by Søren Kierkegaard in his early development, but later became a positivist, retaining and combining with it the spirit and method of practical psychology and the critical school. The physicist Niels Bohr studied philosophy from and became a friend of Høffding. The philosopher and author Ágúst H. Bjarnason was a student of Høffding.
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Ibn Ashir
1582 - 1631 (49 years)
Abd al-Wahid ibn Ashir , commonly known as Ibn Ashir, or Sidi Ben Acher was a Moroccan jurist of the Maliki school of thought. His most well known work is the Al-Murshid al-Mu'een, a lengthy Qasidah which is meant to encourage learning of the Maliki fiqh.
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Henry Phillpotts
1778 - 1869 (91 years)
Henry Phillpotts , often called "Henry of Exeter", was the Anglican Bishop of Exeter from 1830 to 1869. One of England's longest serving bishops since the 14th century, Phillpotts was a striking figure of the 19th-century Church.
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Odoric of Pordenone
1286 - 1331 (45 years)
Odoric of Pordenone , was a Franciscan friar and missionary explorer from the historical Patriarch of Friuli in northeast Italy. He journeyed through India, Sumatra, Java, and China, where he spent three years in the imperial capital of Khanbaliq . After more than ten years of travel, he returned home and dictated a narrative of his experiences and observations called the Relatio, highlighting various cultural, religious, and social peculiarities he encountered in Asia.
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Peter Binsfeld
1545 - 1598 (53 years)
Peter Binsfeld was a German auxiliary bishop and theologian. Peter, a son of a farmer and craftsman, was born in the village of Binsfeld in the rural Eifel region, located in the modern state of Rhineland-Palatinate; he died in Trier as a victim of the bubonic plague. Binsfeld grew up in the predominantly Catholic environment of the Eifel region.
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F. J. A. Hort
1828 - 1892 (64 years)
Fenton John Anthony Hort , known as F. J. A. Hort, was an Irish-born theologian and editor, with Brooke Foss Westcott of a critical edition of The New Testament in the Original Greek. Life He was born on 23 April 1828 in Dublin, the great-grandson of Josiah Hort, Archbishop of Tuam in the eighteenth century. In 1846 he passed from Rugby School to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was the contemporary of E. W. Benson, B. F. Westcott and J. B. Lightfoot. The four men became lifelong friends and fellow-workers. In 1850 Hort took his degree, being third in the classical tripos. In 1851 he also...
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William Ames
1576 - 1633 (57 years)
William Ames was an English Puritan minister, philosopher, and controversialist. He spent much time in the Netherlands, and is noted for his involvement in the controversy between the Calvinists and the Arminians.
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Luke Joseph Hooke
1716 - 1796 (80 years)
Luke Joseph Hooke was a controversial Irish theologian, representing in Paris the "Catholicism of the Enlightenment". The laws of civil society should be so designed, he argued, to enable individuals to conform, through their own free will, to the natural rights ordained by God.
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John Clayton
1709 - 1773 (64 years)
John Clayton was an English clergyman, an early Methodist, and Jacobite supporter. Life He was the son of William Clayton, bookseller, of Manchester, and was born 9 October 1709. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School, and gained the school exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1725. In 1729 the Hulmean scholarship was awarded to him, and a little later he became a college tutor. He proceeded B.A. on 16 April 1729, and M.A. on 8 June 1732.
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Karl Adam
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Karl Adam was a German Catholic theologian, known for his work in the fields of ecclesiology and Christology. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Tübingen, where he published work influenced by Lebensphilosophie and German Romanticism including The Spirit of Catholicism , which argued for an understanding of the church as a community and for a revitalisation of Christian faith. Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Adam sought rapprochement between the Nazi regime and the German Catholic Church. In pursuit of this aim, he published work during the Nazi era that...
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Carl Mirbt
1860 - 1929 (69 years)
Carl Theodor Mirbt was a German Protestant church historian. He was a member of the history of religions school. Biography Mirbt studied theology from 1880 to 1885 in Halle, Erlangen and Göttingen. During his studies in Göttingen, he was a member of the Thuringia Academic Theological Society. In 1888, he became a member of the Theological Faculty of the University of Göttingen with a doctoral dissertation on "The Position of Augustine in the Gregorian Church Dispute". In 1888, he qualified as a Göttingen professor in church history.
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Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Elder
1831 - 1910 (79 years)
Friedrich Christian Carl von Bodelschwingh , better known as Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Elder, was a German theologian and politician. He is remembered as the founder of the v. Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel charitable foundations.
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Anastasius Sinaita
630 - 701 (71 years)
Anastasius Sinaita , also called Anastasius of Sinai or Anastasius the Sinaite, was a Greek writer, priest and abbot of Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. Life What little is known about his life is gathered from his own works. In Antiquity, he was often confused with the bishop and writer Anastasius I of Antioch , and the authorship of various works attributed to Anastasius of Sinai is still vigorously disputed. A canon has been tentatively accepted by modern scholars, but even among these Anastasian works there are spurious sections. His writings concern questions and answers about issues of Christian dogma, ritual, and lifestyle ; sermons; and exegesis.
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Henry Ware
1764 - 1845 (81 years)
Henry Ware was a preacher and theologian influential in the formation of Unitarianism and the American Unitarian Association in the United States. Born in Sherborn, Massachusetts , Ware was educated at Harvard College, earning his A.B. in 1785. He was from 1787 to 1805 the minister of the First Parish in Hingham, Massachusetts. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1804. In 1805 he was elected to the Hollis Chair at Harvard, precipitating a controversy between Unitarians and more conservative Calvinists. He took part in the formation of the Harvard Divinity S...
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José Rafael Campoy
1723 - 1777 (54 years)
José Rafael Campoy Gastélum was a Mexican Jesuit, teacher, scholar, and theologian. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish provinces , he went to Italy, where he died ten years later. Biography José Rafael Campoy was born in Álamos, New Navarre, now known as Sonora. A son of Francisco Xavier Campoy and Andrea Gastélum, he was born into a wealthy and distinguished family.
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Tancred of Bologna
1185 - 1236 (51 years)
Tancred of Bologna or of Germany , commonly just Tancredus, was a Dominican preacher and canonist. He is easily conflated with a contemporary Dominican, Tancred Tancredi, and the two are sometimes indistinguishable in the sources and have been treated as one person, though this is known to be false.
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Erdmann Neumeister
1671 - 1756 (85 years)
Erdmann Neumeister was a German Lutheran pastor and hymnologist. He was born in Uichteritz near Weißenfels in the province Saxonia of Germany. As a fifteen-year-old boy he started his studies in Schulpforta, an old humanistic gymnasium. He became a student of poetology and theology in the University of Leipzig between 1691 and 1697. He began his career as a minister of religion in the spa town of Bibra. He became diaconus for the duke of Saxonia-Weissenfels. From 1705 to 1715, he was superintendent in Sorau . He left for Hamburg because of theological disputes. . He died in Hamburg as an honoured main pastor.
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Joannes Zonaras
1074 - 1145 (71 years)
Joannes or John Zonaras was a Byzantine Greek historian, chronicler and theologian who lived in Constantinople . Under Emperor Alexios I Komnenos he held the offices of head justice and private secretary to the emperor, but after Alexios' death, he retired to the monastery on the Island of Hagia Glykeria, , where he spent the rest of his life writing books.
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Joseph Kleutgen
1811 - 1883 (72 years)
Joseph Wilhelm Karl Kleutgen was a German Jesuit theologian and philosopher. He was a member of the Society of Jesus, and contributed significantly to the establishment of Neo-scholasticism. Life Kleutgen was born in Dortmund, Westphalia. He began his studies with the intention of becoming a priest, but owing to the Protestant atmosphere of the school which he attended, his zeal for religion gradually cooled. From 28 April 1830, to 8 January 1831, he studied philology at the University of Munich. He was intensely interested in Plato's philosophy and the Greek tragic poets. As member of the ...
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Jerome Emser
1477 - 1527 (50 years)
Jerome Emser , German theologian and antagonist of Luther, was born of a good family at Ulm. He studied Greek at Tübingen and jurisprudence at Basel, and after acting for three years as chaplain and secretary to Raymond Peraudi, cardinal of Gurk, he began lecturing on classics in 1504 at Erfurt, where Luther may have been among his audience. In the same year he became secretary to Duke George of Albertine Saxony, who, unlike his cousin Frederick the Wise, the elector of Ernestine Saxony, remained the stanchest defender of Roman Catholicism among the princes of northern Germany.
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Sebastian Gebhard Messmer
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Sebastian Gebhard Messmer was a Swiss-born prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as bishop of the Diocese of Green Bay and Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee . He is largely remembered as a moderate. As a progressive for his time, Messmer opposed segregationist church policies based on race or language, and he was a major supporter of expanding Catholic-run welfare programs. But, he also pushed back against socialism as the movement was growing in Wisconsin, and he opposed women gaining the right to vote.
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Gaston Fessard
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Gaston Fessard was a French Jesuit and theologian. Father Fessard was the author of the first issue of Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien in November 1941, titled "France, Beware the Loss of Your Soul," which opposed Nazism in the name of Christian values. He also argued against the obligation to obey the Vichy government, elaborating his theory of the "slave prince," borrowed from Clausewitz: it is useful to obey the prince while he is sovereign and acts in the common interest, but resistance becomes necessary when the sovereignty of the slave-prince is limited and actions are dictated by the occupier.
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Johann Karl Thilo
1794 - 1853 (59 years)
Johann Karl Thilo was a German theologian and biblical scholar. He studied theology at the University of Leipzig and a final semester at the University of Halle, where he was appointed to teach at the preparatory Paedagogium of the Francke institutions, and assisted his father-in-law, Georg Christian Knapp, director of the theological seminary. In 1820 he travelled to Paris, London and Oxford with his colleague Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius for the examination of rare Eastern manuscripts. At Halle he was privat-docent from 1819, appointed professor of theology and in 1853 a consistori...
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Pope Clement VI
1291 - 1352 (61 years)
Pope Clement VI , born Pierre Roger, was head of the Catholic Church from 7 May 1342 to his death, in December 1352. He was the fourth Avignon pope. Clement reigned during the first visitation of the Black Death , during which he granted remission of sins to all who died of the plague.
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Stephen Samuel Wise
1874 - 1949 (75 years)
Stephen Samuel Wise was an early 20th-century American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader in the Progressive Era. Born in Budapest, he was an infant when his family immigrated to New York. He followed his father and grandfather in becoming a rabbi, serving in New York and in Portland, Oregon. Wise was also a founding member of the NAACP.
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Johannes von Kuhn
1806 - 1887 (81 years)
Johannes Evangelist von Kuhn was a German Catholic theologian. With Franz Anton Staudenmaier he occupied the foremost rank among the speculative dogmatists of the Catholic Tübingen school. Life Kuhn was born in Wäschenbeuren in the Kingdom of Württemberg. He pursued his classical studies at Schwäbisch Gmünd, Ellwangen, and Rottweil, and courses in philosophy and theology from 1825 to 1830 at Tübingen; entered the seminary at Rottenburg in the autumn of 1830, and was there ordained on 14 September 1831. In the autumn of 1832, he became professor of New Testament exegesis in the Catholic theological faculty then attached to the University of Giessen.
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Étienne Tempier
1210 - 1279 (69 years)
Étienne Tempier was a French bishop of Paris during the 13th century. He was Chancellor of the Sorbonne from 1263 to 1268, and bishop of Paris from 1268 until his death. He is best remembered for promulgating a Condemnation of 219 philosophical and theological propositions that addressed concepts that were being disputed in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris.
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William Henry Channing
1810 - 1884 (74 years)
William Henry Channing was an American Unitarian clergyman, writer and philosopher. Biography William Henry Channing was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Channing's father, Francis Dana Channing, died when he was an infant, and responsibility for the young man's education was assumed by his uncle, William Ellery Channing, the pre-eminent Unitarian theologian of the early nineteenth century. The younger William graduated from Harvard College in 1829 and from Harvard Divinity School in 1833. He was ordained and installed over the Unitarian church in Cincinnati in 1835. He became warmly interested in the schemes of Charles Fourier and others for social reorganization.
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Moses Sofer
1762 - 1839 (77 years)
Moses Schreiber , known to his own community and Jewish posterity in the Hebrew translation as Moshe Sofer, also known by his main work Chatam Sofer, Chasam Sofer, or Hatam Sofer , was one of the leading Orthodox rabbis of European Jewry in the first half of the nineteenth century.
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