Harris was born near
Upper Makefield Township, Pennsylvania. He was son of Rev. Walter B.Harris, a Presbyterian minister with a Princeton degree who married Pearl Graves. Known as R. Laird or just Laird, he had an older sister Dr. Bethel Fleming, who became a pioneer physician in Nepal. Her story is told in The Fabulous Flemings of Kathmandu, by Grace Nies Fletcher (E. P. Dutton, N.Y.1964). He earned a
B.S. from the
University of Delaware (1931), a
Th.B. (1935) and a
Th.M. (1937) from
Westminster Theological Seminary, an
A.M. from
University of Pennsylvania (1941), and a
Ph.D. from
Dropsie College (1947). He was licensed as a minister in the
Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1935, joined the newly formed
Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936, then teamed up with those forming the
Bible Presbyterian Church in 1937. In 1956, he became moderator of a new offshoot
denomination, the Bible Presbyterian Synod (BPS), later to become the
Evangelical Presbyterian Church. He was involved on the committee that brought about the merger of the EPC with another
denomination to become the
Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (RPCES) in 1965, and then the RPCES, along with its education institutions
Covenant College and
Covenant Theological Seminary, became part of the
Presbyterian Church in America in 1982, at which time Harris was elected moderator of the 10th
General Assembly of that body. He was part-time instructor in
Hebrew at the University of Pennsylvania (1946–1947) and then taught for twenty years at Faith Theological Seminary (1937–1956). He resigned from that institution because of his belief in the propriety of denomination-controlled institutions, and he then helped found the
Covenant Theological Seminary, which was a denominational institution and where he was chairman of the
Old Testament department until he retired in 1981. Harris served as Professor of Old Testament (and later
adjunct professor) at
Knox Theological Seminary at its founding in 1989. He was actively involved with the development of the Old Testament department there, teaching Hebrew, Hebrew Exegesis, the Pentateuch, and Survey through 1993. Harris's first wife, Elizabeth K. Nelson, was born on April 30, 1910, and died in 1980. He then married Anne P. Krauss and lived in
Quarryville, Pennsylvania. ==Publications==