rom her husband, joining and subsequently marrying Vermes, and Vermes leaving the Fathers of Sion, and the Catholic priesthood.
Desperate for a job that would allow him to remain in Britain, he gladly accepted in 1957 a temporary lectureship in divinity in King's College (then a constituent college of the University of Durham, but now the University of Newcastle). There he cemented his international reputation with Scripture and Tradition (1961), a seminal study of early Jewish bible commentary, and with an English translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1962. The latter, steadily augmented as new scrolls were published, has not been out of print since.
When he was offered the position of reader in Jewish studies at Oxford in 1965 (promoted to full professor in 1989), some in the Jewish community decried the appointment, but buoyed by the support of Oxford luminaries such as David Daube, he dug himself into Oxford life. It was there I first met him, in 1967, when I joined a class he was teaching on the early Jewish law-code the Mishnah. Subsequently I did a doctorate with him on the Aramaic translations of the Bible.
His achievements at Oxford were immense. He took on the editorship of the Journal of Jewish Studies, turning it into one of the foremost in its field, and collaborated with Fergus Millar and Martin Goodman on a major revision of Emil Schürer's multi-volume classic The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ. In Vermes's own truly epoch-making Jesus the Jew (1973), one of the earliest of his many studies of Jesus and the origins of Christianity, he helped launch the new quest for the historical Jesus.
He continued work on the scrolls, but felt he was treading water because the publication of the numerous texts had virtually ground to a halt. Worse still, the small editorial team to whom they had been assigned were barring access to the manuscripts to others willing and able to do it for them. Vermes was at the forefront of the battle to rectify this situation, and it was in part due to his well-fought campaign that in 1991 the unpublished scrolls were finally "liberated" (as he put it), and access granted to any scholar who wanted it. Vermes was invited to become an editor, and, together with myself, published the Cave 4 fragments of the Dead Sea Sect's rule-book, the so-called Community Rule.
Vermes helped build up Jewish studies as an academic discipline, acting as first president both of the British Association for Jewish Studies and of the European Association for Jewish Studies. He attracted a group of talented students to work with him, many of whom became scholars of distinction. Recognition followed thick and fast, including a fellowship of the British Academy, honorary doctorates from Edinburgh, Durham, Sheffield and the Central European University, Budapest, and a vote of congratulation by the US House of Representatives "for inspiring and educating the world".
When Pam died in 1993, he was devastated. But in 1995 he married Margaret, a younger friend, whom he and Pam had known for years. With Margaret came her son Ian from her former marriage. Vermes found himself, to his surprise and delight, playing in his 70s the role of paterfamilias. He was rejuvenated. His intellect and memory remained undimmed to the end, and only weeks before he died he was discussing a new book he planned to write.
"Professor Geza Vermes"
Professor Geza Vermes, who has died aged 88, was from 1965 to 1991 first Reader, then Professor, of Jewish Studies at Oxford and the foremost world authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls — early manuscripts of some Old Testament scriptures, the first of which were discovered accidentally in 1947 by a young Arab shepherd in a cave near the Dead Sea.
May 12th, 2013
Vermes led a long and sometimes bitter battle with the Israeli archaeological authorities to secure publication of all the manuscripts and fragments, copies of which were eventually lodged in the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 1992. His own The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, first published in 1962, had fo