Thursday, May 16, 2013

Geza Vermes - New York Times Obituary

The New York Times has just published its obituary of Geza Vermes, and it is well done.

Geza Vermes, Scholar of Dead Sea Scrolls and ‘Historical Jesus,’ Dies at 88
William Yardley


4 comments:

Stephen Goranson said...

The NYT obit includes the following: "He received his doctorate in theology from the Catholic University in Louvain in 1953; his dissertation was the first written about the scrolls." Early--but not the first. Samuel Iwry's dissertation at Johns Hopkins under W. F. Albright, The Damascus Document and the Dead Sea Scrolls, was completed in 1951.

Stephen Goranson said...

The NYT obit includes the following: "He received his doctorate in theology from the Catholic University in Louvain in 1953; his dissertation was the first written about the scrolls." Early--but not the first. Samuel Iwry's dissertation at Johns Hopkins under W. F. Albright, The Damascus Document and the Dead Sea Scrolls, was completed in 1951.

Stephen Goranson said...

Geza Vermes was indeed an influential scholar who made many important contributions. One I especially appreciate is his revision (with Fergus Millar et al.) of Emil Schürer's The history of the Jewish people in the age of Jesus Christ.
Vermes wrote (in The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls [1997]) that the proposal that the Teacher of Righteousness lived in the time of Jonathan or Simon "was first formulated in my 1952 doctoral dissertation, published in 1953 and was soon adopted with variations in detail by such leading specialists as J. T. Milik, F. M. Cross and R. de Vaux." That is the case, though in my view, the proposal placed the teacher about five decades too early, as explained here:
http://people.duke.edu/~goranson/jannaeus.pdf
In any case, I emailed the correction (with documents of evidence) on Friday May 15. I have heard back, but, as of now, five days later, no correction has been posted.

Stephen Goranson said...

To the Vermes obituary published online on Thursday May 16 the N. Y. Times finally published a correction:
Correction: May 23, 2013
An obituary on Friday about the religious scholar Geza Vermes erroneously attributed a distinction to him. He was one of the first to write a doctoral dissertation about the Dead Sea Scrolls — not the first.