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 1904.[5] 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,[6] 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 colleagues (Harris was a staunch vegetarian).[7] 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.[8]
In 1903 he was appointed the first director of studies at the Society of Friends' new college at Woodbrooke near Birmingham. In accepting the post, he turned down an appointment as a professor of theology at Leiden University. However, students from Leiden attended his courses at Woodbrooke. The university later awarded him a doctorate.[9]
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.[10] He examined the Latin text of the Codex Sangallensis 48.
In 1933, a Festschrift was published in his honor, called Amicitiae Corolla: a volume of essays presented to James Rendel Harris on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
A new biography of Harris was published in 2018.[12]
