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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Religious Studies,
#2551
Bernard Nsayi
#161063
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Bernard Nsayi was the Roman Catholic bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Nkayi, Republic of the Congo. Nsayi was ordained to the priesthood in 1971. He served as bishop of the Diocese of Nkayi from 1990 to 2001. He died in 2021.
Go to Profile#2552
Jutta Burggraf
#184513
Overall Influence
1952 - 2010 (58 years)
Jutta Burggraf was a German Catholic theologian. Burggraf taught at the University of Navarra, where she wrote books and did research. She was a numerary member of Opus Dei.
Go to Profile#2553
Giorgio Otranto
#107503
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
Giorgio Otranto was an Italian historian, specialized in the history of early Christianity. Life and career Born in Corigliano Calabro, the son of a tailor, Otranto graduated in Classical Literature at the University of Bari.
Go to Profile#2554
Maurus Reinkowski
#191959
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Maurus Reinkowski is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Basel. Works Maurus Reinkowski, Düzenin Şeyleri, Tanzimat'ın Kelimeleri: 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Reform Politikasının Karşılaştırmalı Bir Araştırması, Çeviren: Çiğdem Canan Dikmen, İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2017, 351 shf.,
Go to Profile#2555
Gabriel Vanel
#117195
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Gabriel Marie Étienne Vanel was the Roman Catholic archbishop of the Archdiocese of Auch, France. Ordained to the priesthood in 1949, Vanel was named bishop in 1970 and resigned in 1996. Notes
Go to Profile#2556
John Sears Tanner
#174122
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Sears Tanner is a former president of Brigham Young University-Hawaii . He was the 10th president of BYU-Hawaii, serving from 2015 to 2020. He previously served as first counselor in the General Sunday School Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , as president of the church's Brazil São Paulo South Mission and as Academic Vice President of Brigham Young University . Tanner is married to Susan W. Tanner, a former general president of the LDS Church's Young Women organization.
Go to Profile#2557
John Barwick
#154381
Overall Influence
John Barwick was an English theologian. Life Barwick took his name from Berwick, where he appears to have been born or brought up. From Berwick he seems to have removed to the Franciscan schools at Oxford, at which university he became a Doctor of Theology, and is enumerated as the twenty-second reader of divinity belonging to that order in the early years of the fourteenth century. He appears to have studied at Paris likewise; for we are told by Dempster and Bale that he also went by the name of Breulanlius; and this Breulanlius is mentioned towards the end of the fifteenth century by the al...
Go to Profile#2558
Jean Margain
#173726
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Jean Margain was a French Hebraist. He is known by his Semitic and Samaritan studies. Life Education Margain got his Doctor of Arts in 1988 with his thesis Les particules dans le Targum samaritain de Genèse-Exode: jalons pour une histoire de l'araméen samaritain at Université Paris III.
Go to Profile#2559
Sissel Undheim
#191232
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Sissel Undheim is Professor of Religion at the University of Bergen. She is an expert on gender and sexuality in the late Roman period, New Age religion, and the didactics of religion. Education Undheim received her PhD from the University of Bergen in 2011. Her doctoral thesis was entitled Sanctae virginitates: Sacred and Consecrated Virginities in Late Roman Antiquity.
Go to Profile#2560
Eduard Nielsen
#192235
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Eduard Mikael V. Nielsen was a Danish theologian. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen from 1956 to 1991. He was a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 1987.
Go to Profile#2561
Dino Abazović
#170488
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Dino Abazović is a sociologist and Full Professor at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Biography He studied sociology at the Faculty of Political Science in Sarajevo where he graduated in 1999. He earned his post-graduate degree from the same institution in 2005 with a thesis on the sociological determination of religious nationalism. In 2009 he earned his PhD with a thesis on the subject of Bosnian Muslims between secularization and desecularization. In 2012 he was named Centennial Professor and head of the Center for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies at the Faculty of...
Go to Profile#2562
John Meehan
#177659
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
John Meehan SJ is a Canadian Jesuit priest, historian and academic. He is Director of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at Trinity College, University of Toronto. He was president and vice-chancellor of the University of Sudbury in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada from September 2019 until 2021. He was formerly rector of the Church of the Gesù in Montreal and president of Campion College in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Go to Profile#2563
Anne van der Meiden
#160920
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Anne van der Meiden was a Dutch theologian, translator, and professor at Utrecht University. He translated the bible into Tweants dialect.
Go to Profile#2564
Ardeth G. Kapp
#79099
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Ardeth Greene Kapp was the ninth Young Women general president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1984 to 1992. Early life Ardeth Greene was born on March 19, 1931, in Cardston, Alberta, to Edwin Kent Greene and Julia Leavitt Greene. Shortly after her birth her family moved to Glenwood, Alberta. She was baptized into the LDS Church on April 4,1939 in the Cardston Temple. In 1947, she underwent life-threatening surgery due to an ear infection.
Go to Profile#2565
Edvard Kovač
#129680
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Fr. Edvard Kovač is a Slovenian theologian, philosopher and author. He is a member of the Order of Friars Minor and professor at the University of Ljubljana Theological Faculty and the Catholic University of Toulouse.
Go to Profile#2566
Daniel Smokler
#145251
Overall Influence
Rabbi Daniel Smokler is the Chief Innovation Officer of Hillel International . He received a B.A. in History of Art Cum Laude with distinction from Yale University, where he received the Walter Louis Erich Memorial Prize as the outstanding student in the History of Art. In 1997, Smokler founded Jews in the Woods, a multi-denominational gathering of college students for learning, prayer and reflection on social issues. He spent several years after college working as a union organizer. Smokler received his rabbinic ordination from Rabbis Zalman Nechemia Goldberg and Yaakov Moshe Poupko in 2006....
Go to Profile#2567
Barhadbshabba of Hulwan
#188398
Overall Influence
Barḥadbshabba of Ḥulwān was a 7th-century theologian and Christian bishop of the Church of the East who wrote many religious works and a history of the School of Nisibis which is of historical interest.
Go to Profile#2568
Niels Jørgen Cappelørn
#130505
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Niels Jørgen Cappelørn is a Danish theologian, Søren Kierkegaard scholar and former director of Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen. He has written and edited a number of books on Kierkegaard, and was editor of Index til Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, bind XIV-XVI . He was Director of the Danish Bible Society from 1980 to 1993.
Go to Profile#2569
Richard of Campsall
#191317
Overall Influence
Richard of Campsall was an English theologian and scholastic philosopher, at the University of Oxford. He was a Fellow of Balliol College and then of Merton College. He is now considered a possible precursor to the views usually associated with William of Ockham.
Go to Profile#2570
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.
Go to Profile#2571
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.
Go to Profile#2572
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.
Go to Profile#2573
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.
Go to Profile#2574
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.
Go to Profile#2577
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.
Go to Profile#2578
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...
Go to Profile#2579
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...
Go to Profile#2580
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.
Go to Profile#2592
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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