Kirsopp Lake

Artist Info

Kirsopp LakeSouthampton, England, 1872 - 1946, South Pasadena, California

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n88663360

Lake, Kirsopp (1872–1946), biblical scholar, was born in Southampton on 7 April 1872, the son of a physician and surgeon, George Anthony Kirsopp Lake, and his wife, Isabel Oke Clark. He was educated at St Paul's School, and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he won a second class in theology in 1895, and was Arnold essay prizeman in 1902. He was curate of Lumley, Durham, from 1895 until 1896 when he was ordained priest. From 1897 to 1904 he was curate of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford. Here one of his most important works was written, The Text of the New Testament (1900; 6th edn, ed. S. New, 1928). He also edited Codex 1 of the Gospels and its Allies (1902) the group of manuscripts now known as ‘Fam. 1’ or the ‘Lake group’, and also various texts from Mount Athos. In 1904 he married Helen Courthope, daughter of Sidney Mills Forman, a businessman of Newcastle upon Tyne. They had one son and one daughter.

From 1904 to 1914 Lake was professor ordinarius of early Christian literature and New Testament exegesis at the University of Leiden, where in addition to further research and writings in the field of textual criticism he produced two major works, The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1907) and The Earlier Epistles of St Paul (1911). The latter, characterized alike by wide learning and careful judgement, was a kind of prolegomenon to his work, undertaken with F. J. Foakes Jackson, The Beginnings of Christianity (5 vols., 1920–33), as an immense introduction to the book of Acts. Lake gave to many readers of the Earlier Epistles a sense of their relation to the contemporary world of the first century, a realization of the importance of Koine Greek and of the ubiquitous and all-pervasive influence of the Jewish and Hellenistic religions in the world of St Paul and his earliest converts. All later New Testament study has been influenced by this book. In 1911 he published, with his wife, his photographic facsimile Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus: the New Testament, the epistle of Barnabas, and the shepherd of Hermas.

In 1914 Lake moved to the United States and became professor of early Christian literature at Harvard; in 1919 he became Winn professor of ecclesiastical history and in 1932 professor of history. Between 1934 and 1939 he published in ten fascicles a series of examples, Dated Greek Minuscule Manuscripts to the Year 1200. In 1938 he retired as emeritus. His marriage was dissolved in 1932 and in that year Lake married Silva Tipple New, daughter of Bertrand Tipple, who survived him. There was one son of the second marriage.

As an archaeologist and palaeographer Lake made many summer visits to Mount Athos and other libraries; during his Harvard days he headed the archaeological expeditions (1930, 1935) to Serabit in the Sinai peninsula, to Samaria (1932, 1934), and to Lake Van in Turkey (1938, 1939). He was elected an honorary fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1941, was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding member of the Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and in 1936 was awarded the British Academy medal for biblical studies. He received the honorary degrees of DD from St Andrews (1911), ThD from Leiden (1922), LittD from Michigan (1926), and PhD from Heidelberg (1936).

Lake's chief contributions to scholarship were in the historical field, especially the study of St Paul and the Acts of the Apostles, and in textual criticism, where he not only popularized the study and introduced it to many students, but made marked, permanent progress in such new areas as the identification of the Lake group of manuscripts and of the so-called Caesarean text, the type of text associated with the ancient library of Pamphilus at Caesarea. Kirsopp Lake died at South Pasadena, California, on 10 November 1946.

F. C. Grant, rev.

Sources

The Times (23 Nov 1946) · personal knowledge (1959) · private information (1959) · F. L. Cross, ed., Oxford dictionary of the Christian church, 3rd edn, ed. E. A. Livingstone (1997)