Kirsopp Lake
Kirsopp Lake (7 April 1872 – 10 November 1946) was an English New Testament scholar, Church historian, Greek palaeographer, and Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School.
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 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.
"[6] Following graduation Lake was ordained a deacon in the Church of England (1895) 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?!
'"[6] After a year's service he was ordained priest (1896); 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.
[9] 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.
"[10] 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.
"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.
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 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" (p. 167).
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.
[7] 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.
It "was largely attended by scholars of the most varied interests in the University, not only theological, but historical, classical, mathematical, and Oriental [...] Lake paid frequent visits from Leiden" and "the United States and Canada were not unrepresented" (vol.
[15] During his early years at Harvard, Lake continued to be active with The Churchmen's Union, an Anglican society for the advancement of liberal religious thought.
Lake said that the task of the liberal Christian is "not to go back upon the inherited Catholic doctrines of the Church, but to apply and to expand them, because we see that in the end they are true so long as you do not limit them.
He explained that he and Lake believed that the Jesus whom the early Church preached was not "a character of singular charm and beauty during his life on earth, but a Risen Saviour who was expected to come speedily to judge the quick and the dead."
On 18 August 1932, Lake obtained a Reno divorce from his first wife Helen, whom he had been separated from for five years.
The divorce caused such a stir that Lake was forced to resign the Winn chair on 28 September 1932 and became professor of history in Harvard College, a position he held until his retirement in 1938.
These were important publications, for they encouraged scholars to look beyond the more well known manuscripts and realise the worth of encompassing a wide range of textual variants in any editing of the Greek text.
He seems to have been effective, for James Luther Adams, one of his students during 1924–27, recalls: "It was his characteristic interest to make historical figures come alive, so that we might see their significance today and not merely study them as so many items from a dead past."
He took an almost childlike interest in digging out alternative answers to historical questions [...] Students who thought themselves completely secularized and immune to any 'religious nonsense' attended his lectures and heard him publicly burrow down into the biblical concepts, taking as his point of departure something highly imaginative in one of the parables, and then rise up to fly with it.
While passing through Cairo they met the Egyptologist Alan H. Gardiner who suggested that on their return they might stop by Serabit el-Khadim, which was in the neighbourhood of the monastery, and attempt to locate a number of previously noticed inscriptions in a Proto-Sinaitic script.
As Lake remarked in his account of the adventure: "'in the neighborhood' is a relative matter, for, stated in terms of time instead of space, the monastery was about as far from Serabit as New York is from San Francisco."
In the results of the expedition that were published in 1932, Lake described the camp: "It was not exactly luxurious, and on two days when it rained it was extremely uncomfortable, as we had to spend the whole time in the cave, in which it was impossible to stand upright except in a few spots.
[21] In 1929, Lake approached John Winter Crowfoot of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ) about a joint excavation with some other institutions of Samaria, to complete the earlier work of Harvard's George A. Reisner.
"[22] In 1938–39, Lake along with Silva and Robert P. Casey from Brown University were allowed to conduct a small excavation of Van Fortress in Turkish Armenia.
In later years she reflected on the impact he had on her life: "my general interests should be attributed mainly to the influence of my father who was a New testament scholar with a classical education and a passionate love of beauty.
"[10] His grandson Anthony Lake is a diplomat who held high US federal government positions including as National Security Advisor under U.S. President Bill Clinton.
