otect them. Vermes was desperate to further his education but saw little chance, as a Jew, of gaining a place at university. Entering the priesthood offered a way forward.
Turned down by the Jesuits, he was accepted by the diocese of Nagyvárad, and began life as a seminarian. The move was providential and saved his life, when, in March 1944, German forces occupied Hungary, setting up a puppet government, which, under Adolf Eichmann, rapidly began to implement against the Jews the Nazis' "final solution". Vermes's parents perished – exactly when, where and how he never discovered. With the aid of the church Vermes managed to remain hidden, and was liberated by the Red Army in Budapest in December 1944.
He resumed his studies for the priesthood, but as ordination approached, the thought of parish ministry appealed to him less and less. He was desperate to continue studying. An attempt to join the Dominicans was rebuffed, but he was admitted to the Order of the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion, and after a hair-raising journey across war-ravaged Europe he entered their house in Louvain, Belgium, in 1948. The nearby Catholic University of Louvain gave him the chance to become a licencié in theology and philosophy, and he completed his doctorate on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
His superiors then moved him to the Paris house of the Fathers of Sion. There he engaged with Paul Démann in a campaign, fought through the pages of the order's journal, Cahiers Sioniens, to challenge the anti-Judaism then rampant in the Catholic church. He broadened his education, meeting leading scholars such as André Dupont-Sommer and attending the classes of Georges Vajda. Renée Bloch introduced him to Jewish Bible commentary (midrash) – a field in which he later excelled.
On a visit to Britain, he was introduced by a mutual friend to Pamela, and, in late 1955, they fell in love. The situation was complicated and stressful. Pam was married with two young daughters. Vermes was a Catholic priest. It was resolved (reasonably amicably) by Pam separating from 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 