Kirsopp Lake
Kirsopp Lake was an English New Testament scholar, Church historian, Greek palaeographer, and Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School.
He had an uncommon breadth of interests. His main lines of research were the history of early Christianity, textual criticism of the New Testament, and Greek palaeography, in which fields he published definitive monographs. He also studied the historical figure of Jesus and wrote about theology and archaeology. He edited and translated a two-volume anthology of ancient Christian literature and the first five books of Eusebius' Church History for the Loeb Classical Library.
He is best known for his massive five-volume work The Beginnings of Christianity—an edition, translation, commentary, and study of the Acts of the Apostles—that he conceived and edited with F. J. Foakes-Jackson, and for the ten-volume series of Dated Greek Manuscripts to the year 1200—edited with his second wife, Silva New, one of the leading repertoires of facsimiles of Greek manuscripts. He also published works about Italian monasteries, the textual tradition of the New Testament, and the Caesarean text of the Gospel of Mark.
Early life
Kirsopp Lake was born in Southampton, England, on 7 April 1872, the elder of two surviving children of George Anthony Kirsopp Lake, a physician, and Isabel Oke Clark. His father came from a family of Scottish origin and Kirsopp was the family name of the boy's paternal grandmother. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and then went up to Lincoln College, Oxford, matriculating in 1891. He attended as an Exhibitioner and was the Skinners' Company's Scholar in 1893, finally graduating with a second class in theology. He also attended Cuddesdon Theological College in 1895. He originally had intended to read law and to pursue a career in politics. However, an overdose of exercise, too soon after influenza, affected his heart and he was told by doctors that law and politics were out of the question. According to his son, "he was delicate and the church seemed to give the opportunity for a living and for some influence over the society that interested him."Curate in England
Following graduation Lake was ordained a deacon in the Church of England and served as curate in Lumley, Durham, where he preached to the pitmen and miners in that North Country mining district. "I do not believe that theology entered very much into his sermons," recalls his son, "but he did conduct The Mikado and he still tells the story of the brawny pitman who, having rescued him from the attack of a drunken navvy from a neighbouring village and listened to his comments on the situation, said 'Mon, he's no much to look at, but has he no a bonny tongue?!'" After a year's service he was ordained priest ; however, he had further issues with his heart and decided to return to Oxford, to the less rigorous climate of the South to improve his health.He earned his M.A. in 1897 and from that year to 1904 he served as curate of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, a much more academic atmosphere. During these years, to supplement his income, he also took a job cataloguing Greek manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. That activity aroused in him an interest in the Synoptic problem and matters of New Testament textual criticism, and saw the publication of his first book, the very useful handbook The Text of the New Testament. Some sixty years later Stephen Neill describes the 6th ed. as "still the best short introduction to New Testament textual criticism that exists in any language." It was most likely the influence exerted over him by F. C. Conybeare, Fellow of University College, Oxford, which was the main factor in Lake's development. It was Conybeare who initiated Lake into the mysteries and problems of New Testament palaeography and textual criticism. Lake's palaeographical interests led him in search of more manuscripts and in 1898 he undertook a trip to the libraries of Basel, Venice, and Rome. The fruits of that trip were published in Codex 1 of the Gospels and Its Allies. Lake had discovered a textual family of New Testament manuscripts known as Family 1. To this family belong minuscules: 1, 118, 131, and 209. In the summers of 1899 and 1903 he undertook trips in search of manuscripts to the Greek monasteries on Mount Athos. He published editions of several manuscripts uncovered there, a catalogue of all the manuscripts inspected, and even a history of the monasteries themselves. In 1902 he won the Arnold Essay Prize at Oxford University for his study "The Greek Monasteries in South Italy," which was published in four instalments in the Journal of Theological Studies, vols. 4 and 5.
On 10 November 1903, he married Helen Courthope Forman, the daughter of Freda Gardiner and Sidney Mills Forman, a businessman of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland. They had two children, Gerard Anthony Christian Kirsopp Lake and Agnes Freda Isabel Kirsopp Lake. It was also during these later years of his curacy that Lake "began to doubt the teachings of the church and to think in terms of history and exegesis rather than theology and parish difficulties." As his son reports, my father "has often said that the turning point in his belief in the church came when his Vicar suggested that prayers be said at Vespers for a Mr. Brown, since the doctor had just announced that there was no hope for him. The story may be apocryphal but I think it is indicative of his point of view." His daughter Agnes, "in conversations, was less polite and oblique: 'Heresy' was her word, pronounced with glee and gusto." This type of thinking may have run in the family, for Lake told Alfred North Whitehead in 1922 that his father, the physician, "being asked late in life what had done the most in his lifetime to relieve human suffering, answered, 'Anaesthesia and the decay of Christian theology.'"
Professor in Leiden
In line with these new interests and activities, Lake accepted an offer in 1903 to become professor of New Testament exegesis and early Christian literature at the Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands. He taught there for ten years, from 1904 until 1914. His inaugural lecture, which he delivered in English, was on "The Influence of Textual Criticism on the Exegesis of the New Testament." At the close of the lecture he looked his students in the face. "I am very sorry," he said, "that for a few months I shall be handicapped by my inability to use your language, but I hope that by next September I shall be in a position to lecture in Dutch, at least partially, even though it may be necessary to apologize for frequent solecisms, and for an imperfect pronunciation." He kept his promise and quickly learned to lecture in Dutch. The lecture was published in 1904 and has proven to be a seminal study; though, as Elliott has noted: "It has taken nearly a century for his general thesis that textual variants must be used as an invaluable source for our study of the history of the church to bear fruit in a determined way."In addition to his inaugural lecture, Lake published two important books on historical and exegetical matters concerning the New Testament during his time in Leiden: The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul: Their Motive and Origin. As Metzger explains: "These studies, particularly the latter, revealed Lake's ability to analyze and evaluate complex historical and literary data and to set forth scholarly reconstructions with clarity and a certain persuasiveness." In Historical Evidence Lake sets forth his approach: "The first task of the historical inquirer is to collect the pieces of evidence; the second is to discuss the trustworthiness and meaning of each separate piece; and the third is to reconstruct the events to which the evidence relates". As for the reconstruction, he explains: "In any such attempt it is desirable to remember that the reconstruction of an original tradition from forms of later dates and of divergent contents must be guided by exactly the same principle as is the reconstruction of an original text from a number of extant MSS. In each case the fundamental problem is the retracing of the line of development followed by the various authorities, and the solution depends chiefly on the ability to detect errors of transmission and to explain their existence". As for The Earlier Epistles, Neill writes: "I think that those of us who read Lake when we were young will be inclined to think that this is one of the best books on the New Testament that has ever been written in the English language. This is the way it ought to be done. Under Lake's skillful guidance, we feel ourselves one with those new and struggling groups of Christians, in all the perplexities of trying to discover what it means to be a Christian in a non-Christian world. And there is the Apostle, so very much in working clothes and without a halo; we feel in our bones the passionate eagerness of Paul for better news from Corinth, the passionate relief when the good news arrives." The book brought the conclusions of the German history of religions school to the attention of English-speaking world for the first time, and all later New Testament study has been influenced by this book.
True to the second component of his professorship, Lake produced a number of works on early Christian literature. He was a member of a special committee of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology charged with investigating the text of the New Testament as it has been preserved in the Apostolic Fathers. His specific responsibility was the Didache and the results of his investigations were published in 1905. For the Loeb Classical Library series he prepared a new edition of the Greek texts of the Apostolic Fathers, which in keeping with the series were furnished with a facing English translation and a short introduction. The finished work was issued in two volumes, Nos. 24 and 25, published in 1912 and 1913. Also during this time he travelled to the Imperial Library of St. Petersburg together with his first wife Helen during the summer of 1908 and photographed the very important Codex Sinaiticus and then published in facsimile the New Testament along with the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas and the Old Testament, following another visit to the library in 1913. These volumes were furnished with valuable introductions and were a marked improvement from the earlier editions of Tischendorf. In 1913 Lake was a favoured candidate for lecturer in theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, but word of his unorthodox views reached the Master of Trinity, Henry Montagu Butler, and the choice in consequence fell on the other candidate Frederick Tennant. Again, in early 1914 some of his friends sought to secure his appointment to a canonry in Westminster Abbey, but the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, having read Lake's Historical Evidence, decided that he could not nominate him. As his friend H. D. A. Major explained, Lake "would gladly have remained in England. But his intellectual originality combined with the fearlessness of his utterances—he was neither a 'safe man' nor a 'yes man'—proved detrimental to his promotion both in academic and ecclesiastical circles."