Carl Gustav Adolf von Harnack was a Baltic German Lutheran theologian and prominent Church historian. He produced many religious publications from 1873 to 1912. He was ennobled in 1914.

Ferdinand Christian Baur was a German Protestant theologian and founder and leader of the (new) Tübingen School of theology. Following Hegel's theory of dialectic, Baur argued that second century Christianity represented the synthesis of two opposing theses: Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christianity. This and the rest of Baur's work had a profound impact upon higher criticism of biblical and related texts.