Review of Vermes, The Story of the Scrolls

THE STORY OF THE SCROLLS, by Geza Vermes, is reviewed in the Jerusalem Post:

Captivated by the Scrolls
By TIBOR KRAUSZ
15/05/2010 14:26

A testimonial to a great scholar’s enduring love affair with the ancient documents.

One Sunday morning in 1948, a Jewish-born Hungarian student at the Fathers of Notre Dame de Sion Catholic order’s seminary in Louvain watched as his professor in class held up a photograph of Chapter 40 from the Book of Isaiah. The young seminarian’s curiosity was instantly piqued: the photograph was of a 2,000-year-old manuscript fragment from a cache discovered a year before by Bedouin shepherds in caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea.

“Staring at it, I became captivated,” Geza Vermes told The Jerusalem Report by phone from his home in Oxford, England, where he is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Wolfson College. “With youthful zeal I vowed to solve the greatest Hebrew manuscript discovery of all time. Ever since, the scrolls and my life have been intertwined.”

Six decades on, Vermes clearly remains captivated by the ancient documents unearthed in the Judean desert. At the slightest prodding he declaims at length on them with undiminished enthusiasm. And while the world’s leading authority on the historic manuscripts may not wear his love of the scrolls on his sleeve, he does often wear it on his tie. Emblazoned on a custom-made necktie that Vermes, an owlish man with old-world charm, wears for his public lectures are fragments of the Community Rule, a sectarian document recovered from Cave 4 at Qumran, which the Oxford professor personally worked on deciphering.

In a summing-up of his career-long involvement with the scrolls from shortly after their discovery, the 86-year-old scholar, who is still a prolific author, has just published “The Story of the Scrolls,” a lucid, comprehensive look at the ancient texts’ history and importance and the insular, enigmatic Dead Sea community that produced them.

[...]

Overall this is a good survey of Vermes's work and is worth reading in full, but this annoys me:

In a 1990 interview with the Haaretz newspaper, John Strugnell, a mercurial alcoholic who had taken over from de Vaux as editor, would label Judaism “a horrible religion,” lamenting its continued existence.

Strugnell also suffered from bipolar disorder and was in the midst of a manic episode when he gave this interview. This does not excuse what he said, but in fairness to him it should be noted.

For other recent reviews of Vermes's books, go here. More on the Strugnell episode here.

(Again, via Joseph I. Lauer's list.)