The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Religious Studies,
#2651
Richard Simon
1638 - 1712 (74 years)
Richard Simon CO , was a French priest, a member of the Oratorians, who was an influential biblical critic, orientalist and controversialist. Early years Simon was born at Dieppe. His early education took place at the Oratorian college there, and a benefice enabled him to study theology at Paris, where he showed an interest in Hebrew and other Oriental languages. He entered the Oratorians as novice in 1662. At the end of his novitiate he was sent to teach philosophy at the College of Juilly. But he was soon recalled to Paris, and employed in preparing a catalogue of the Oriental books in the l...
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Hendrik Kraemer
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Hendrik Kraemer was a lay missiologist and figure in the ecumenical movement from Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands. He encouraged the Dutch to allow the spread missionary activities outside of the Dutch East India Company-restricted area in eastern Indonesia to the rest of the archipelago.
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Peter Martyr Vermigli
1499 - 1562 (63 years)
Peter Martyr Vermigli was an Italian-born Reformed theologian. His early work as a reformer in Catholic Italy and his decision to flee for Protestant northern Europe influenced many other Italians to convert and flee as well. In England, he influenced the Edwardian Reformation, including the Eucharistic service of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. He was considered an authority on the Eucharist among the Reformed churches, and engaged in controversies on the subject by writing treatises. Vermigli's Loci Communes, a compilation of excerpts from his biblical commentaries organised by the topics o...
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Günther Bornkamm
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Günther Bornkamm was a German New Testament scholar belonging to the school of Rudolf Bultmann and a Professor of New Testament at the University of Heidelberg. Under Adolf Hitler, he opposed the nazification of the Protestant churches and their unification into the movement of the 'German Christians'. His post-war fame as a scholar rested on his effort to separate fiction from facts in his reconstruction of Jesus' life and in his subsequent treatment of the gospel of Matthew. His brother was the ecclesiastical historian and Luther scholar .
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Wilhelm Bousset
1865 - 1920 (55 years)
Wilhelm Bousset was a German theologian and New Testament scholar. He was of Huguenot ancestry and a native of Lübeck. His most influential work was Kyrios Christos, an attempt to explain the origins of devotion to Christ as the product of second century Hellenistic forces, and is still the most widely influential academic work on early Christology, even if its conclusions are not supported by modern scholarship.
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John Fisher
1469 - 1535 (66 years)
John Fisher was an English Catholic bishop, cardinal, and theologian. Fisher was also an academic and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is honoured as a martyr and saint by the Catholic Church.
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Austin Farrer
1904 - 1968 (64 years)
Austin Marsden Farrer was an English Anglican philosopher, theologian, and biblical scholar. His activity in philosophy, theology, and spirituality led many to consider him one of the greatest figures of 20th-century Anglicanism. He served as Warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1960 to 1968.
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Johann Jakob Wettstein
1693 - 1754 (61 years)
Johann Jakob Wettstein was a Swiss theologian, best known as a New Testament critic. Biography Youth and study Johann Jakob Wettstein was born in Basel. Among his tutors in theology was Samuel Werenfels , an influential anticipator of modern critical exegesis. While still a student, Wettstein began to direct his attention to the special pursuit of his life, the text of the Greek New Testament. A relative, Johann Wettstein, who was the university librarian, gave him permission to examine and collate the principal manuscripts of the New Testament in the library, and he copied the various readi...
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Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale
1947 - 1984 (37 years)
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a Sikh militant. He was the leading figure of the Khalistan movement, although he did not personally advocate for a separate Sikh nation. He was the fourteenth jathedar or leader, of the prominent orthodox Sikh religious institution Damdami Taksal. An advocate of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, he gained significant attention after his involvement in the 1978 Sikh-Nirankari clash. In the summer of 1982, Bhindranwale and the Akali Dal launched the Dharam Yudh Morcha , with its stated aim being the fulfilment of a list of demands based on the Anandpur Sahib Resolution to create a largely autonomous state within India.
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Joseph Hubert Reinkens
1821 - 1896 (75 years)
Joseph Hubert Reinkens was the first German Old Catholic bishop. Biography He was born at Burtscheid in the Rhine Province, the son of a gardener. In 1836, on the death of his mother, he took to manual work in order to support his numerous brothers and sisters, but in 1840 he was able to go to the gymnasium at Aachen, and he afterwards studied theology at the universities of Bonn and Munich. He was ordained priest in 1848, and in 1849 graduated as doctor in theology. He was soon appointed professor of ecclesiastical history at Breslau, and in 1865 he was made rector of the university. During...
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Caesarius of Arles
470 - 542 (72 years)
Caesarius of Arles , sometimes called "of Chalon" from his birthplace Chalon-sur-Saône, was the foremost ecclesiastic of his generation in Merovingian Gaul. Caesarius is considered to be of the last generation of church leaders of Gaul who worked to promote large-scale ascetic elements into the Western Christian tradition. William E. Klingshirn's study of Caesarius depicts Caesarius as having the reputation of a "popular preacher of great fervour and enduring influence". Among those who exercised the greatest influence on Caesarius were Augustine of Hippo, Julianus Pomerius, and John Cassian...
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Helvidius
340 - 390 (50 years)
Helvidius was the author of a work written prior to 383 against the belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary. Helvidius maintained that the biblical mention of "sisters" and "brothers" of the Lord constitutes solid evidence that Mary had normal marital relations with Joseph and additional children after the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus. He supported his opinion by the writings of Tertullian and Victorinus. Helvidius is sometimes seen as an early proto-protestant, along with Vigiliantius, Jovinian and Aerius of Sebaste.
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Ahmad Ghazali
1100 - 1126 (26 years)
Ahmad Ghazālī was a Sunni Muslim Persian Sufi mystic, writer, preacher and the head of Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad . He is best known in the history of Islam for his ideas on love and the meaning of love, expressed primarily in the book Sawāneḥ.
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Christoph Friedrich von Ammon
1766 - 1850 (84 years)
Christoph Friedrich von Ammon was a German theological writer and preacher. He was born at Bayreuth, Bavaria and died at Dresden. He studied at Erlangen, held various professorships in the philosophical and theological faculties of Erlangen and Göttingen, succeeded Franz Volkmar Reinhard in 1813 as court preacher and member of the Upper Consistory of the Church of Saxony at Dresden, retired from these offices in 1849. Seeking to establish for himself a middle position between rationalism and supernaturalism, he declared for a "rational supernaturalism," and contended that there must be a gradual development of Christian doctrine corresponding to the advance of knowledge and science.
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Adolf Kamphausen
1829 - 1910 (81 years)
Adolf Kamphausen was a German Protestant theologian. He was known for his liberal views in regard to Biblical exegesis. He was born in Solingen and educated at the University of Bonn. In 1855, as private secretary to Bunsen, he assisted him in his great Völlstandiges Bibelwerk für die Gemeinde. At the same time he was privatdocent at Heidelberg, and in 1863 he became an associate professor of theology at Bonn. In 1868 he attained a full professorship, serving as university rector in 1893/94.
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William Barclay
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
William Barclay CBE was a Scottish author, radio and television presenter, Church of Scotland minister, and Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow. He wrote a popular set of Bible commentaries on the New Testament that sold 1.5 million copies.
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Albert Barnes
1798 - 1870 (72 years)
Albert Barnes was an American theologian, clergyman, abolitionist, temperance advocate, and author. Barnes is best known for his extensive Bible commentary and notes on the Old and New Testaments, published in a total of 14 volumes in the 1830s.
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Harald Poelchau
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Harald Poelchau was a German prison chaplain, religious socialist and member of the resistance against the Nazis. Poelchau grew up in Silesia. During the early 1920's, he studied Protestant theology at the University of Tübingen and the University of Marburg, followed by social work at the College of Political Science of Berlin. Poelchau gained a doctorate under Paul Tillich at Frankfurt University. In 1933, he became a prison chaplain in the Berlin prisons. With the coming of the Nazi regime in 1933, he became am anti-fascist. During the war, Poelchau and his wife Dorothee Poelchau helped victims of the Nazi's, hiding them and helping them escape.
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James Legge
1815 - 1897 (82 years)
James Legge was a Scottish linguist, missionary, sinologist, and translator who was best known as an early translator of Classical Chinese texts into English. Legge served as a representative of the London Missionary Society in Malacca and Hong Kong and was the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford University . In association with Max Müller he prepared the monumental Sacred Books of the East series, published in 50 volumes between 1879 and 1891.
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Muhammed Hamdi Yazır
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Muhammed Hamdi Yazır also known as Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır and Elmalılı was a Turkish Maturidi theologian, logician, Qur'an translator, Qur'anic exegesis scholar, Islamic legal academic, philosopher and encyclopedist.
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Johann Baptist von Hirscher
1788 - 1865 (77 years)
Johann Baptist von Hirscher was a German Catholic theologian associated with the Catholic Tübingen school. He exerted a great influence in the areas of moral theology, homiletics, and catechetics. Life He was born in Alt-Ergarten, Bodnegg. His parents were pious peasants. He studied at Weissenau monastery school, the lyceum of Constance. The vicar general of the diocese, Ignaz Heinrich von Wessenberg became his patron. Hirscher attended the University of Freiburg and entered the seminary in Meersburg in 1809. He was ordained priest in 1810. For two years he was curate at ; in 1812 he became ...
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Johannes Stricker
1816 - 1886 (70 years)
Johannes Paulus Stricker was a Dutch theologian and biblical scholar. He attended the University of Leiden where he worked with J. F. van Oordt, a key figure in the new Groningen theology. He sat his ordination examination in May 1841, and was appointed to a ministerial post in October of that year. In December of that year, he married Willemina Carbentus, an older sister of Vincent van Gogh's mother. As an uncle he tutored the young Vincent in theology and biblical criticism in 1877–78.
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Samuel Simon Schmucker
1799 - 1873 (74 years)
Samuel Simon Schmucker was a German-American Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was integral to the founding of the Lutheran church body known as the General Synod, as well as the oldest continuously operating Lutheran seminary and college in North America .
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Johannes Andreas Quenstedt
1617 - 1688 (71 years)
Johannes Andreas Quenstedt was a German Lutheran dogmatician in the Lutheran scholastic tradition. Quenstedt was born at Quedlinburg, a nephew of Johann Gerhard. He was educated at the University of Helmstedt, 1637–43, and at the University of Wittenberg, 1644, where afterwards he lectured on geography; was adjunct professor in the philosophical faculty, 1646–49; ordinary professor of logic and metaphysics and associate professor of theology, 1649–60; and ordinary professor of theology, 1660–88 until his death.
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Gottfried Christian Friedrich Lücke
1791 - 1855 (64 years)
Gottfried Christian Friedrich Lücke was a German theologian. Luecke was born at Egeln near Magdeburg, where his father was a merchant. He studied theology at Halle and Göttingen. In 1814 he received the degree of doctor in philosophy from Halle; in 1816 he moved to the Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin, where he became licentiate in theology, and qualified as Privatdozent.
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Heinrich Julius Holtzmann
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
Heinrich Julius Holtzmann , German Protestant theologian, son of theologian Karl Julius Holtzmann , was born at Karlsruhe, where his father ultimately became prelate and counsellor to the supreme consistory of the Evangelical State Church in Baden.
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Praxeas
200 - 300 (100 years)
Praxeas was a Monarchian from Asia Minor who lived in the end of the 2nd century/beginning of the 3rd century. He believed in the unity of the Godhead and vehemently disagreed with any attempt at division of the personalities or personages of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Christian Church. He was opposed by Tertullian in his tract Against Praxeas , and was influential in preventing the Roman Church from granting recognition to the New Prophecy.
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Bernhard Weiss
1827 - 1918 (91 years)
Bernhard Weiss was a German Protestant New Testament scholar. He was the father of Johannes Weiss and the painter, Hedwig Weiss. Biography Weiss was born at Königsberg. After studying theology at the University of Königsberg , Halle and Berlin, he became professor extraordinarius at Königsberg in 1852, and afterwards professor ordinarius at Kiel and Berlin. In 1880 he was made superior consistorial councillor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces.
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G. B. Caird
1917 - 1984 (67 years)
George Bradford Caird , known as G. B. Caird, was a British theologian, biblical scholar and Congregational minister. At the time of his death he was Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford.
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Pierre Viret
1511 - 1571 (60 years)
Pierre Viret was a Swiss Reformed theologian, evangelist and Protestant reformer. Early life Pierre Viret was born in 1509 or 1510 in Orbe, then in the Barony of Vaud, now in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. He was the son of Guillaume Viret, a tailor and shearer. After attending school in his hometown, Viret studied at the Collège de Montaigu of the University of Paris, where he came in contact with and converted to the Reformed faith. He returned to Orbe in 1531 to escape the persecutions in Paris.
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Vincent McNabb
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Vincent McNabb, O.P. was an Irish Catholic scholar and Dominican priest based in London, active in evangelisation and apologetics. Early life McNabb was born in Portaferry, County Down, Ireland, the tenth of eleven children. He was educated during his schooldays at the diocesan seminary of St. Malachy's College, Belfast. On 10 November 1885 he joined the novitiate of the English Dominicans at Woodchester in Gloucestershire, England and was ordained in 1891. After studies at the University of Louvain, where he obtained in 1894 the degree of Licentiate of Sacred Theology, he was sent to England...
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Ignaz Maybaum
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Ignaz Maybaum was a rabbi and 20th-century liberal Jewish theologian. Life Maybaum was born in Vienna in 1897. He studied in Berlin at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, where he was ordained as a rabbi in 1926. He took rabbinic posts in Bingen, Frankfurt an der Oder and Berlin. He was a disciple of Franz Rosenzweig.
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Rudolf Smend
1851 - 1913 (62 years)
Rudolf Smend --"the Elder"-- was a German theologian born in Lengerich, Westphalia. He was an older brother to theologian Julius Smend , and the father of Carl Friedrich Rudolf Smend , an authority on constitutional and ecclesiastical law, and the grandfather of noted Old Testament historian Rudolf Smend who spent his life at the University of Goettingen as one of two chairs of Old Testament .
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Emil Bock
1895 - 1959 (64 years)
Emil Bock was a German anthroposophist, author, theologian and one of the founders of The Christian Community. In 1914 he began a study of languages at the University of Bonn. However, the same year he enlisted as a volunteer in the First World War and was sent to the front in Flanders, where he was wounded. In 1916, he met for the first time the theologian Friedrich Rittelmeyer, and from 1918 he studied Protestant theology in Berlin, and graduated in 1921. The same year was one of the founders of the Christian Community in Switzerland. Bock soon became the leader of the seminar of the Christ...
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Pietro Tamburini
1737 - 1827 (90 years)
Pietro Tamburini was an Italian theologian and jurist. He openly espoused Jansenism as a university professor. Biography Pietro was born in Brescia and was educated by local priest, including the Dominican friar Pavoni, and later at seminary, by the Theatine father Scarella, who had Jansenist leanings. Tamburini was ordained a priest in 1760. Under the patronage of the Bishop of Brescia, later Cardinal, Giovanni Molin, he was appointed professor of metaphysics at the Brescian episcopal seminary. In 1771, he published a treatise on grace, De summa catholicae de gratia Christi doctrinae praest...
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Alec Vidler
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Alexander Roper Vidler , known as Alec Vidler, was an English Anglican priest, theologian, and ecclesiastical historian, who served as Dean of King's College, Cambridge, for ten years from 1956 and then, following his retirement in 1966, as Mayor of Rye, Sussex.
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Optatus
400 - 397 (-3 years)
Saint Optatus, sometimes anglicized as St. Optate, was Bishop of Milevis, in Numidia, in the fourth century, remembered for his writings against Donatism. Biography and context St. Augustine suggests that Optatus was a convert: "Do we not see with how great a booty of gold and silver and garments Cyprian, doctor suavissimus, came forth out of Egypt, and likewise Lactantius, Victorinus, Optatus, Hilary?" .
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Julius Wegscheider
1771 - 1849 (78 years)
Julius August Ludwig Wegscheider , was a German Protestant theologian. Life Wegscheider was born at Küblingen . He studied theology at the University of Helmstedt, where he was a pupil of Heinrich Philipp Konrad Henke. From 1795 to 1805, he worked as a tutor to the family of a wealthy Hamburg merchant. In 1805 he presented a dissertation titled Graecorum mysteriis religioni non obtrudendis at the University of Göttingen. He then served as a professor of theology at the University of Rinteln , and at the University of Halle from 1810 onwards.
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Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider
1776 - 1848 (72 years)
Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider was a German Protestant scholar and theologian from Gersdorf, Saxony. He is noted for, among other things, having planned and founded the monumental Corpus Reformatorum. He is the father of Carl Anton Bretschneider, a mathematician.
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Ignatius Knoblecher
1819 - 1858 (39 years)
Ignatius Knoblecher , also known by his Arabian nickname Abuna Soliman , was a Slovene Roman Catholic missionary in Eastern North Africa. He was one of the first explorers of the White Nile basin. Life Knoblecher was born in the small village of Škocjan in Lower Carniola. He studied at the secondary school in Rudolfswerth , at the lyceum and the theological seminary in Laibach , and at the College of Propaganda in Rome. On 9 March 1845 he was ordained a priest, and a year later graduated as a doctor of theology.
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Leo Allatius
1586 - 1669 (83 years)
Leo Allatius was a Greek scholar, theologian, and keeper of the Vatican library. Biography Leo Allatius was a Greek, born on the island of Chios in 1586. His father was Niccolas Allatzes and his mother was Sebaste Neurides, both of Greek extraction . He was taken by his maternal uncle Michael Nauridis to Italy to be educated at the age of nine, first in Calabria and then in Rome where he was admitted into the Greek college. A graduate of the Pontifical Greek College of Saint Athanasius in Rome, he spent his career in Rome as teacher of Greek at the Greek college, devoting himself to the study of classics and theology.
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Samuel Bochart
1599 - 1667 (68 years)
Samuel Bochart was a French Protestant biblical scholar, a student of Thomas Erpenius and the teacher of Pierre Daniel Huet. His two-volume exerted a profound influence on seventeenth-century Biblical exegesis.
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John Taylor
1694 - 1761 (67 years)
John Taylor was an English dissenting preacher, Hebrew scholar, and theologian. Early life The son of a timber merchant at Lancaster, he was born at Scotforth, Lancashire. His father, John was an Anglican, his mother, Susannah a dissenter. Taylor began his education for the dissenting ministry in 1709 under Thomas Dixon at Whitehaven, where he drew up for himself a Hebrew grammar . From Whitehaven he went to study under the tutor Thomas Hill, son of the ejected minister Thomas Hill, near Derby. Leaving Hill on 25 March 1715, he took charge on 7 April of an extra-parochial chapel at Kirkstead, Lincolnshire, then used for nonconformist worship by the Disney family.
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Henry Ware Jr.
1794 - 1843 (49 years)
Henry Ware Jr. was an influential Unitarian theologian, early member of the faculty of Harvard Divinity School, and first president of the Harvard Musical Association. He was a mentor of Ralph Waldo Emerson when Emerson studied for the ministry in the 1820s.
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Jan Długosz
1415 - 1480 (65 years)
Jan Długosz , also known in Latin as Johannes Longinus, was a Polish priest, chronicler, diplomat, soldier, and secretary to Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki of Kraków. He is considered Poland's first historian.
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Matthew Poole
1624 - 1679 (55 years)
Matthew Poole was an English Non-conformist theologian and biblical commentator. Life to 1662 He was born at York, the son of Francis Pole, but he spelled his name Poole, and in Latin Polus; his mother was a daughter of Alderman Toppins there. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from 1645, under John Worthington. Having graduated B.A. at the beginning of 1649, he succeeded Anthony Tuckney, in the sequestered rectory of St Michael le Querne, then in the fifth classis of the London province, under the parliamentary system of presbyterianism. This was his only preferment. He proceeded M.A.
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Paulinus of Nola
354 - 431 (77 years)
Paulinus of Nola born Pontius Meropius Anicius Paulinus, was a Roman poet, writer, and senator who attained the ranks of suffect consul and governor of Campania but – following the assassination of the emperor Gratian and under the influence of his Hispanic wife Therasia of Nola — abandoned his career, was baptized as a Christian, and probably after Therasia's death became bishop of Nola in Campania. While there, he wrote poems in honor of his predecessor Saint Felix and corresponded with other Christian leaders throughout the empire. He is credited with the introduction of bells to Christi...
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James Madison Pendleton
1811 - 1891 (80 years)
James Madison Pendleton was a leading 19th-century American Baptist preacher, educator and theologian. Early life James Madison Pendleton was born November 20, 1811, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, the son of John Pendleton and Frances Jackson Thompson. He was named for President James Madison. When he was small his parents moved to Christian County, Kentucky. At age seventeen, he united with the Bethel church in Christian County and was baptized.
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Frank Hugh Foster
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Frank Hugh Foster, Ph. D., D.D. was an American clergyman of the Congregational church. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and graduated at Harvard in 1873. In his activities, he was assistant professor of mathematics in the United States Naval Academy, graduated at Andover Theological Seminary , served as pastor at North Reading, Massachusetts, studied at Göttingen and Leipzig , and from 1882 to 1884 was professor of philosophy in Middlebury College. In 1884 he was appointed professor of Church history in the Oberlin Theological Seminary; from 1892 to 1902, he served at Berkeley, ...
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Shailer Mathews
1863 - 1941 (78 years)
Shailer Mathews was an American liberal Christian theologian, involved with the Social Gospel movement. Career Born on May 26, 1863, in Portland, Maine, and graduated from Colby College. Mathews was a progressive, advocating social concerns as part of the Social Gospel message, and subjecting biblical texts to scientific study, in opposition to contemporary conservative Christians. He incorporated evolutionary theory into his religious views, noting that the two were not mutually exclusive. He remained a devout Baptist for his entire life, and helped establish the Northern Baptist Convention, serving as its president in 1915.
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