page_title: Kirsopp Lake
section_title: Curate in England
hierarchical_section_title: Kirsopp Lake / Curate in England
caption_attribution_description: English: facsimile edition of the codex with text Luke 1:1-2; it was published in: in: F.H.A. Scrivener, "A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament", 4th edition, London 1894.
context_page_description: Kirsopp Lake was an English New Testament scholar, Church historian, and Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School. He had an uncommon breadth of interests, publishing definitive monographs in textual criticism of the New Testament, Greek palaeography, theology, and archaeology. He is probably best known for the massive five-volume work The Beginnings of Christianity—an edition, translation, commentary, and study of the Acts of Apostles—that he conceived and edited with F. J. Foakes-Jackson and, among palaeographers, for the 10-volumes 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.
context_section_description: 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?!'" 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.
  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 (1900).  Some sixty years later Stephen Neill describes the 6th ed. (1928) 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 (1902).  Lake had discovered a textual family of New Testament manuscripts known as Family 1 (also known as Lake group). To this family belong minuscules: 1, 118, 131, and 209. In the summers of 1899 and 1903 (and many thereafter) he undertook trips in search of manuscripts to the Greek monasteries on Mount Athos.  He published (1903, 1905, 1907) editions of several manuscripts uncovered there, a catalogue of all the manuscripts inspected, and even a history of the monasteries themselves (1909).  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 (1874 – 22 October 1958), 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 (27 December 1904 – 3 September 1972) and Agnes Freda Isabel Kirsopp Lake (31 July 1909 – 3 November 1993). 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.'"
caption: Codex 1 (Luke 1:1–2), whose text Lake published in 1902 along with other readings from Family 1.
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