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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Religious Studies,
#4701
Adolf Schlatter
1852 - 1938 (86 years)
Adolf Schlatter was a well-known Swiss-born German Protestant theologian and professor specialising in the New Testament and systematics at Greifswald, Berlin and Tübingen. Schlatter has published more than 400 scholarly and popular pieces during his academic career. In his work "The Nature of New Testament Theology. The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter", Robert Morgan writes: "Schlatter ... was considered a conservative, and is perhaps the only 'conservative' New Testament scholar since Bengel who can be rated in the same class as Baur, Wrede, Bousset and Bultmann". There ha...
Go to Profile#4702
Ibn al-Rawandi
827 - 911 (84 years)
Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Ishaq al-Rawandi , commonly known as Ibn al-Rawandi , was an early Persian scholar and theologian. In his early days, he was a Mu'tazilite scholar, but then rejected the Mu'tazilite doctrine. Afterwards, he became a Shia scholar; there is some debate about whether he stayed a Shia until his death or became a skeptic, though most sources confirm his eventual rejection of all religion and becoming an atheist. Although none of his works have survived, his opinions had been preserved through his critics and the surviving books that answered him. His book with the m...
Go to Profile#4703
Petrus Cunaeus
1586 - 1638 (52 years)
Petrus Cunaeus was the pen name of the Dutch Christian scholar Peter van der Kun. His book The Hebrew Republic is considered "the most powerful statement of republican theory in the early years of the Dutch Republic."
Go to Profile#4704
Wilfrid
634 - 709 (75 years)
Wilfrid was an English bishop and saint. Born a Northumbrian noble, he entered religious life as a teenager and studied at Lindisfarne, at Canterbury, in Francia, and at Rome; he returned to Northumbria in about 660, and became the abbot of a newly founded monastery at Ripon. In 664 Wilfrid acted as spokesman for the Roman position at the Synod of Whitby, and became famous for his speech advocating that the Roman method for calculating the date of Easter should be adopted. His success prompted the king's son, Alhfrith, to appoint him Bishop of Northumbria. Wilfrid chose to be consecrated in G...
Go to Profile#4705
Luigi Taparelli
1793 - 1862 (69 years)
Luigi Taparelli was an Italian Jesuit scholar of the Society of Jesus and counter-revolutionary who coined the term social justice and elaborated the principles of subsidiarity, as part of his natural law theory of just social order. He was the brother of the Italian statesman Massimo d'Azeglio.
Go to Profile#4706
Francisco Ribera
1537 - 1591 (54 years)
Francisco Ribera was a Spanish Jesuit theologian, identified with the Futurist Christian eschatological view. Life Ribera was born at Villacastín. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1570, and taught at the University of Salamanca. He acted as confessor to Teresa of Avila. He died in 1591 at the age of fifty-four, one year after the publication of his work In Sacrum Beati Ioannis Apostoli, & Evangelistiae Apocalypsin Commentarij.
Go to Profile#4707
Harry A. Ironside
1876 - 1951 (75 years)
Henry Allan "Harry" Ironside was a Canadian–American Bible teacher, preacher, theologian, pastor and author who pastored Moody Church in Chicago from 1929 to 1948. Biography Ironside was born in Toronto, Ontario, to John and Sophia Ironside, who were both active in the Plymouth Brethren. At birth, Harry was thought to be dead, so the attending nurses focused their attention on Sophia, who was dangerously ill. Only when a pulse was detected in Harry, 40 minutes later, was an attempt made to resuscitate the infant. When Harry was two years old, his father, John, died of typhoid at the age of 27.
Go to Profile#4708
Gottfried Arnold
1666 - 1714 (48 years)
Gottfried Arnold was a German Lutheran theologian and historian. Biography Arnold was born at Annaberg in Saxony, Germany, where his father was schoolmaster. In 1682, he went to the Gymnasium at Gera and three years later to the University of Wittenberg. He made a special study of theology and history, and afterwards, through the influence of Philip Jacob Spener, the father of pietism, became tutor in Quedlinburg.
Go to Profile#4709
Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen
1691 - 1747 (56 years)
Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen was a German-American Dutch Reformed minister, theologian and the progenitor of the Frelinghuysen family in the United States of America. Frelinghuysen is most remembered for his religious contributions in the Raritan Valley during the beginnings of the First Great Awakening. Several of his descendants became influential theologians and politicians throughout American history.
Go to Profile#4710
Giuseppe Ricciotti
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Giuseppe Ricciotti was an Italian canon regular, Biblical scholar and archeologist. He is famous mainly for his book The Life of Christ edited in 1941 and reedited and reprinted several times. Life Ricciotti was born in Rome on 27 February 1890. In 1905 he entered the novitiate of the Roman Catholic religious order of the Canons Regular of the Lateran, taking religious vows the following year. After his seminary studies and completing mandatory military service, he was ordained as a priest in 1913. After ordination, Ricciotti continued his studies at the University of Rome, where he took courses in both philosophy and theology.
Go to Profile#4711
Frédéric Louis Godet
1812 - 1900 (88 years)
Frédéric Louis Godet was a Swiss Protestant theologian. Biography Godet was born on 25 October 1812 in Neuchâtel. His father, Paul-Henri, who was a lawyer, died early. His mother, Eusébie née Gallot, a pious, strong and intelligent pastor's daughter, who founded a girls' school, devoted herself to his early training.
Go to Profile#4712
Andreas Osiander
1498 - 1552 (54 years)
Andreas Osiander was a German Lutheran theologian and Protestant reformer. Career Born at Gunzenhausen, Ansbach, in the region of Franconia, Osiander studied at the University of Ingolstadt before being ordained as a priest in 1520 in Nuremberg. In the same year he began work at an Augustinian convent in Nuremberg as a Hebrew tutor. In 1522, he was appointed to the church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, and at the same time publicly declared himself to be a Lutheran. During the First Diet of Nuremberg , he met Albert of Prussia, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, and played an important role in converting him to Lutheranism.
Go to Profile#4713
Johann Gottfried Scheibel
1783 - 1843 (60 years)
Johann Gottfried Scheibel was a German theologian and a leader of the Old Lutherans. Education and Ministry Johann Scheibel was born in Breslau, Silesia, and studied at the University of Halle from 1801 to 1804. He went on from there to be the assistant minister at St Elisabeth's Church in Breslau from 1804 to 1815, then advancing to deacon. Between 1811 and 1830 he was a professor of theology, first on an extraordinary, since 1818 on an ordinary chair, at the Silesian Frederick William's University in Breslau until he was suspended from his post.
Go to Profile#4714
Henry Oldenburg
1619 - 1677 (58 years)
Henry Oldenburg was a German theologian, diplomat, and natural philosopher, known as one of the creators of modern scientific peer review. He was one of the foremost intelligencerss of 17th-century Europe, with a network of correspondents to rival those of Fabri de Peiresc, Marin Mersenne, and Ismaël Boulliau. At the foundation of the Royal Society in London, he took on the task of foreign correspondence, as the first Secretary.
Go to Profile#4715
Hugh Latimer
1485 - 1555 (70 years)
Hugh Latimer was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, and later Church of England chaplain to King Edward VI. In 1555 under the Catholic Queen Mary I he was burned at the stake, becoming one of the three Oxford Martyrs of Anglicanism.
Go to Profile#4716
Pierius
201 - Present (1825 years)
Pierius was a Christian priest and probably head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, conjointly with Achillas. He flourished while Theonas was bishop of Alexandria, and died at Rome after 309. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 4 November.
Go to Profile#4717
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.
Go to Profile#4718
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.
Go to Profile#4719
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.
Go to Profile#4720
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.
Go to Profile#4721
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.
Go to Profile#4722
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.
Go to Profile#4723
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.
Go to Profile#4724
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.
Go to Profile#4725
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.
Go to Profile#4726
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 ...
Go to Profile#4727
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.
Go to Profile#4728
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 .
Go to Profile#4729
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.
Go to Profile#4730
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.
Go to Profile#4731
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.
Go to Profile#4732
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.
Go to Profile#4733
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.
Go to Profile#4734
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.
Go to Profile#4735
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.
Go to Profile#4736
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...
Go to Profile#4737
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.
Go to Profile#4738
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 .
Go to Profile#4739
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...
Go to Profile#4740
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...
Go to Profile#4741
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.
Go to Profile#4742
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?" .
Go to Profile#4743
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.
Go to Profile#4744
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.
Go to Profile#4745
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.
Go to Profile#4746
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.
Go to Profile#4747
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.
Go to Profile#4748
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.
Go to Profile#4749
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.
Go to Profile#4750
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.
Go to Profile