Franz Bibfeldt
Franz Bibfeldt is a famous, ficticious theologian and in-joke among American academic theologians.
Bibfeldt made his first appearance as the author of an invented footnote in a term paper of a Concordia Seminary student, Robert Howard Clausen. Clausen's classmate, Marty Martin was struck by the name and Bibfeldt became a running joke for Martin and his friends. In 1951, Martin's review of Bibfeldt's The Relieved Paradox was published in the Concordia Seminarian.
Since then the Bibfeldt scholarships have greatly expanded, though the preponderance of work has come out of the University of Chicago where Marty Martin was professor and where there is a Donnelley Stool of Bibfeldt Studies.
Most of the scholarship to date is collected in The unrelieved paradox: studies in the theology of Franz Bibfeldt ISBN 0802807453 edited by Martin Marty and Jerald C. Brauer.