Kirsopp Lake

Kirsopp Lake. [Born] 1872. Theologian, historian, archaeologist, teacher.

I ask you to listen not to me but to Professor Lake in his preface to Paul: His Heritage and Legacy:

“Without Paul, . . . Christianity would not have lived on: and no one can understand how not only Christianity, but civilization as a whole, has reached its present form, or been faced by its particular problems in theological and moral formulation, unless he sees to what an enormous extent St. Paul gave to the early Christian Church thoughts and conventions which were sufficiently, but not too far, ahead of the standards of its contemporaries. But as soon as he sees this he sees also that much which was once ahead of contemporary thought now lags behind it. Whether the ecclesiastical world will ever see this is doubtful, but those who do see it are the heirs of Christianity even if the name of Christian be denied them. . . .”

There is much more of Lake that I ought to quote and if I had time to quote it you would have no wonder that five hundred students came to his final Harvard lecture and cheered him, his voice breaking as he said his farewell, and as he slowly, stooping, walked away.

He was slight and he was bent and he was never robust and he talked squeakingly like the Oxford Englishman, sometime curate of St. Mary the Virgin, that he had been; but he had brains and he had character and great knowledge and understanding, and he never was heavy.

As to the quality of his scholarship, it may be said, without any doubt, that all Biblical studies henceforth will be in his permanent debt.

And what kind of Centurion was he? I shall tell you: His wife wrote me that just before he died, K. said to her: “I have a small balance at the Century. Ask Henry to see to it that it goes into the Christmas Fund for the staff.”

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1946 Memorials