page_title: Kirsopp Lake
section_title: Harvard years
hierarchical_section_title: Kirsopp Lake / Harvard years
caption_attribution_description: English: Kirsopp Lake (1872-1946), Silva Tipple New Lake (1898-1983), and Robert Pierce Casey (1897-1959), co-leaders of a 1938 Brown University-University of Pennsylvania joint expedition to excavate the site of the ancient city of Van in Asia Minor.
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: In the fall of 1913 Lake travelled to the United States to lecture for a year at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and to deliver the Lowell Lectures in Boston. Just before he was to leave for Europe he was offered a position at Harvard Divinity School, which he accepted. In the announcement of his hiring it was reported: "He comes when there is no definite gap to be filled, but merely because his eminent scholarship could add to the teaching strength of Harvard." From 1914 until 1919 he was professor of early Christian literature. Then in 1919, following the retirement of Ephraim Emerton, he was appointed to a Harvard chair becoming the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History, which he held until 1932.  From 1915 to 1919 he was also a lecturer in New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
  While at Harvard Lake laboured to bring forth the monumental five volume work The Beginnings of Christianity. Beginnings was a project that had been conceived during conversations with F. J. Foakes-Jackson while Lake was still at the Leiden University, sometime before 1912 (vol. v, p. vii). It sought to investigate the view "that Christianity in the first century achieved a synthesis between the Greco-Oriental and the Jewish religions in the Roman Empire.  The preaching of repentance, and of the Kingdom of God begun by Jesus passed into the sacramental cult of the Lord Jesus Christ. But the details are complex and obscure.  What were the exact elements in this synthesis? How was it effected?" (vol. i, p. vii). The undertaking began at Cambridge University in the form of a seminar, presided over by F. C. Burkitt.  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. v, p. vii). The project was to be a grand endeavour. The five volumes that were ultimately published only comprise "Part I". As they explain: "Before, however, attempting to reconstruct this history we believed it necessary to study Acts in the light of the results of modern criticism. [...] Later on we hope to return to the subject and reconsider the narrative of the life of Jesus, and the influence on the Church of his own teaching and of the teaching of others about him" (vol. ii, p. v). As it turned out they were never able to "return to the subject" and complete the project. "In sum," writes Baird, "The Beginnings of Christianity is a monumental work—the most extensive investigation of a NT book by English-speaking scholarship" (cf. vol. v, p. ix).
  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. He and Foakes-Jackson lent their support to H. D. A. Major in organising a conference of Modern Churchmen (which continues till this day). The first was held at Ripon, Yorkshire, 3–6 July 1914. Foakes-Jackson and Lake delivered an attack on Liberal Protestantism. 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." The most famous of the conferences was the one held at Girton College, Cambridge, 8–15 August 1921. Its subject was "Christ and the Creeds" and it was planned as a response to Lake's publication of the first volume of The Beginnings of Christianity. Lake did not attend, so it was left to Foakes-Jackson to defend their positions. 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." Liberal Protestants, he argued, were preaching a Christ who had no historical foundation.  From 1915 to 1931 Lake served as one of vice-presidents of 
caption: Kirsopp and Silva Lake with Robert P. Casey prior to the Van expedition, 1938.
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