page_title: Kirsopp Lake
section_title: Professor in Leiden
hierarchical_section_title: Kirsopp Lake / Professor in Leiden
caption_attribution_description: English: page of the codex with text Matthew 2:5-3:7
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 line with these new interests and activities, Lake accepted an offer in 1903 to become professor (ordinarius) of New Testament exegesis and early Christian literature at the Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands. He taught there for ten years, from 1904 until 1914.  His inaugural lecture, which he delivered in English, was on "The Influence of Textual Criticism on the Exegesis of the New Testament." At the close of the lecture he looked his students in the face. "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." He kept his promise and quickly learned to lecture in Dutch. The lecture was published in 1904 and has proven to be a seminal study; though, as Elliott has noted: "It has taken nearly a century for his general thesis that textual variants must be used as an invaluable source for our study of the history of the church to bear fruit in a determined way."
  In addition to his inaugural lecture, Lake published two important books on historical and exegetical matters concerning the New Testament during his time in Leiden: The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1907) and The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul: Their Motive and Origin (1911). 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 Historical Evidence Lake sets forth his approach: "The first task of the historical inquirer is to collect the pieces of evidence; the second is to discuss the trustworthiness and meaning of each separate piece; and the third is to reconstruct the events to which the evidence relates" (p. 6). As for the reconstruction, he explains: "In any such attempt it is desirable to remember that the reconstruction of an original tradition from forms of later dates and of divergent contents must be guided by exactly the same principle as is the reconstruction of an original text from a number of extant MSS. 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).  As for The Earlier Epistles, Neill writes: "I think that those of us who read Lake when we were young will be inclined to think that this is one of the best books on the New Testament that has ever been written in the English language. This is the way it ought to be done.  Under Lake's skillful guidance, we feel ourselves one with those new and struggling groups of Christians, in all the perplexities of trying to discover what it means to be a Christian in a non-Christian world. And there is the Apostle, so very much in working clothes and without a halo; we feel in our bones the passionate eagerness of Paul for better news from Corinth, the passionate relief when the good news arrives." The book brought the conclusions of the German history of religions school to the attention of English-speaking world for the first time, and all later New Testament study has been influenced by this book.
  True to the second component of his professorship, Lake produced a number of works on early Christian literature. 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. His specific responsibility was the Didache and the results of his investigations were published in 1905.  For the Loeb Classical Library series he prepared a new edition of the Greek texts of the Apostolic Fathers, which in keeping with the series were furnished with a facing English translation and a short introduction. The finished
caption: Codex Sinaiticus (Mt 2:5–3:7), from which Lake produced a facsimile edition (1911, 1922).
exif: {}