LAKE, KIRSOPP. - English philologist, b. at Southampton on 7 April 1872, d. in California in November 1946. He was professor of various theological disciplines at Leiden in Holland (1904-14) and then at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1915-38). He distinguished himself especially by numerous palaeographic and critical researches, above all on the Greek text of the New Testament, in which field he rendered outstanding services to biblical science. Not so in the properly religious or theological field, since L. with a rationalistic mentality conceived of Christianity as the fusion of Jewish monotheism with the ideologies of the mystery religions, and did not acknowledge in Jesus a clear messianic consciousness.
A group of manuscripts of the Gospels takes its name from L., on which he was the first to bring his study and to attract the attention of scholars. They are all minuscules (11th-14th centuries) and are grouped around no. 1 of the series of minuscules according to the most widely used notation (Tischendorf-Gregory). As a special type of text that group was later recognized and doubled in members by von Soden, and by more recent studies it was identified as part of the great family called Caesarean, and more especially of its pre-Caesarean branch. Among all its congeners this group 1 or λ (L.) is the one that comes closest to the type (esteemed the best of all) of codex Vat. B and its companions; hence its critical value.
Writings of L.: Codex 1 of the Gospels and its allies, Cambridge 1902; Greek monasteries in south Italy, in Journal of theol. stud., 5 (1903-1904), pp. 22-41, 189-202; The earlier epistles of st. Paul, London 1911; The text of the New Test., 6th ed., ibid. 1928; Dated greek minuscule manuscripts, 10 vols., Boston 1934-39; in collaboration with F. Jackson, The beginnings of christianity, 5 vols., London 1922-33; Paul, his heritage and legacy, 1934; Introduction to the New Test., 1937.
Alberto Vaccari