author
Kirsopp Lake
1872–1946
A pioneering New Testament scholar and church historian, he combined detective work in ancient manuscripts with a gift for making early Christianity vivid and human. His career carried him from Oxford and Leiden to Harvard, where he became one of the best-known biblical scholars of his time.
1 Audiobook
Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity
by Kirsopp Lake
About the author
Born in Southampton, England, on April 7, 1872, Kirsopp Lake was educated at St Paul's School and Lincoln College, Oxford. He was ordained in the Church of England, but his lasting reputation came from scholarship rather than parish ministry. Early on, he made his name through work on the text of the New Testament, Greek manuscripts, and the history of the early church.
Lake taught at the University of Leiden before moving to the United States in 1914 to join Harvard Divinity School, where he later served as Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History. He became known for a wide range of interests, including textual criticism, paleography, theology, and archaeology, and he helped bring rigorous manuscript study to a broader reading public.
He is especially remembered for his research on New Testament manuscripts and for major collaborative work on the beginnings of Christianity. Even when writing about difficult scholarly questions, Lake often aimed for clarity and directness, which helped make his books useful not only to specialists but also to general readers curious about how the Christian tradition took shape. He died on November 10, 1946, in Pasadena, California.