James Rendel Harris

James Rendel Harris (Plymouth, Devon, 27 January 1852 – 1 March 1941) was an English biblical scholar and curator of manuscripts, who was instrumental in bringing back to light many Syriac Scriptures and other early documents. His contacts at the Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt enabled twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson to discover there the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest Syriac New Testament document in existence. He subsequently accompanied them on a second trip, with Robert Bensly and Francis Crawford Burkitt, to decipher the palimpsest. He himself discovered there other manuscripts (073, 0118, 0119, 0137, a Syriac text of the Apology of Aristides etc.,). Harris's Biblical Fragments from Mount Sinai appeared in 1890. He was a Quaker.

He was born to a Congregationalist family, one of eleven children. His father, Henry Marmaduke Harris, was a house decorator. His mother, Elizabeth Corker Harris, run a shop of baby clothes. His paternal aunt, Augusta Harris, was the mother of the poet Henry Austin Dobson. After studying at Plymouth Grammar school, he enrolled at Clare College, Cambridge, and was third at the mathematical tripos of 1874. He was a fellow of Clare from 1875 to 1878, in 1892, and from 1902 to 1904. In 1880 he married a Quaker from Plymouth, Helen Balkwill, and under her influence and that of the envangelical revival of the 1870s, in 1885 he became a member of the Society of Friends. He moved to the USA in 1882 following his wife who was at the time engaged in missionary work, and was appointed professor of New Testament Greek at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, US (1882–85). Harris resigned his post in response to criticism that his attack on the vivisection practiced in the Johns Hopkins laboratories had elicited from his colleages. The couple returned to Britain for a short while, as Harris was soon appointed professor in Biblical Studies at Haverford College, near Philadelphia (1886–91). In 1888-1889, while on leave from Haverford, he travelled to Palestine and Egypt, purchasing 47 rolls and codices written in Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopic. He said that these texts, which discussed biblical and linguistic topics and some of which were as old as the 13th century, were "all acquired by the lawful, though sometimes tedious, processes of Oriental commerce". During this journey, he also discovered the Syriac version of the Apology of Aristides in the Monastery of Saint Catherine. Upon his return, he donated the manuscripts he had collected to Haverford. They are held by the college library's Quaker Collection. He taught theology at Leiden University (1903–04). After this, he was appointed director of studies at the Society of Friends' Woodbrooke College, near Birmingham.

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