Posted on 05/01/2006 6:42:52 PM PDT by Borges
John C. Trever, the American scholar who photographed the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem in 1948, has died, his family reported. He was 90.
Trever died Saturday at his home in Lake Forest in Orange County, said his son, Albuquerque Journal political cartoonist John Trever.
The younger Trever said it was by chance that his father happened to be in Jerusalem doing unrelated research when Father Boutros Sowmy brought several scrolls to the American School of Oriental Research in February 1948 that were said to have been found in a cave the year before by a Bedouin shepherd.
Although he was there to do postdoctorate studies on biblical flora, Trever was also experienced in photographing ancient scrolls and quickly took pictures of the finds. He had immediately recognized a similarity between the scrolls' script and that of the Nash Papyrus, at the time the oldest known biblical manuscript.
"Among them was the Isaiah Scroll, which was not a fragment but a complete scroll," Trever's son said. "His photos are the ones that really show the scroll in the original condition."
Trever, who had earned his doctorate in old testament studies from Yale in 1943, was doing research while on sabbatical from Drake University.
He is credited as being the first American scholar to come in contact with the scrolls in the James VanderKam and Peter Flint book "The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance For Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity."
His photos continue to appear widely in books and articles on them.
Trever spent much of his life lecturing and writing books on the scrolls, as well as returning to the holy land from time to time to take part in archaeological digs.
Among his books were "Scrolls from Qumran Cave One," "The Untold Story of Qumran" and "The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Personal Account."
Trever also taught at several colleges, including Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio, Morris Harvey College in West Virginia (now known as the University of Charleston) and California's Claremont School of Theology.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, his son said, he worked for the National Council of Churches, promoting and explaining the revised standard version of the Bible.
He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, sons John and James, six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
pseudo-GGG ping
May he rest in peace.
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