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.

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 (especially in his later life). 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.