J. Rendel Harris
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James Rendel Harris (Plymouth, Devon, January 27, 1852 – March 1, 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 Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai enabled Agnes Smith Lewis and her sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson to discover there the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest New Testament document in existence.
He was educated at Clare College, Cambridge, where he was a fellow in mathematics in 1875–78, 1892, and in 1902–04. Harris spent as much time in the Near East as he could. During the same time, he served as professor of New Testament Greek at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (1882–85) and at Haverford College (1882–92). In 1889 and 1890, while on leave from Haverford, he purchased 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". Upon his return, he donated them to Haverford. 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.
Harris represented two prestigious libraries during his lifetime: Johns Hopkins, and John Rylands Library, Manchester, where he became the curator of manuscripts. Most of his publications dealt with biblical and patristic history; he was an extremely prolific writer.
Included among the topics on which he wrote are: Apology of Aristides (1891), Didache, Philo, Diatessaron, the Christian Apologists, Acts of Perpetua, The Odes and Psalms of Solomon (1906), Gospel of Peter, and other Western and Syriac texts, and numerous works on biblical manuscripts.
