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. 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). 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. 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. 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. He examined the Latin text of the
Codex Sangallensis 48. Included among the topics on which he wrote are: the
Apology of Aristides (1891), the
Didache,
Philo, the
Diatessaron, the Christian Apologists,
Acts of Perpetua,
The Odes and Psalms of Solomon (1909), the
Gospel of Peter, and other Western and
Syriac texts, and numerous works on biblical manuscripts. 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. ==Works==