J. Rendel Harris

James Rendel Harris (27 January 1852 in Plymouth, Devon – 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.

Life

Harris was born to a Congregationalist family and grew up as one of eleven children. His father, Henry Marmaduke Harris, was a house decorator. His mother, Elizabeth Corker Harris, ran a shop selling baby clothes. His paternal aunt, Augusta Harris, was the mother of the poet Henry Austin Dobson.

Educated at Plymouth Grammar School and Clare College, Cambridge, he was third Wrangler in the mathematical Tripos of 1874. He was a fellow of Clare College from 1875 to 1878, in 1892, and from 1902 to 1903. In 1880, he married a Quaker from Plymouth, Helen Balkwill, and under her influence and that of the Evangelical Revival of the 1870s, in 1885 he became a member of the Society of Friends. He moved to the United States 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 in Baltimore, US (1882–1885). Harris resigned his post in response to criticism that his attack on the vivisection practiced in the Johns Hopkins laboratories had elicited from his colleagues (Harris was a staunch vegetarian). The couple returned to Britain for a short while, as Harris was soon appointed professor in Biblical Studies at Haverford College, near Philadelphia (1886–1891).