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In the first chapter of this book, in the ‘Portrait of the story-teller’, I outlined how I initially got involved with the Scrolls. The rest of the volume offers snippets of my further participation in the Qumran saga and its vast contribution to the historical, cultural and religious knowledge of Judaism and Christianity. I feel enormously privileged and am humbly grateful for the part I have been allowed to play in it. This volume has gone to the printers in 2009, the year which eventually saw the completion of the publication of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, with the final volume of the series, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. It also marks the sixtieth anniversary of my first essay on the Scrolls in the long-defunct Parisian periodical, Cahiers Sioniens (vol. 3, August 1949, pp. 224–33), ‘Nouvelles lumières sur la Bible et le Judaïsme’ (New lights on the Bible and Judaism). The next landmark – let us hope – will come in 2012, the golden jubilee of The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, born in 1962 with a Qumran manuscript on its front cover – printed upside down.
To continue on a lighthearted, cheerful but still personal note, let me end the volume by quoting from the conclusion of a lecture entitled ‘Living with the Dead Sea Scrolls’, which I delivered in the British Museum in 2004. It records three memorable and amusing anecdotes of my life as a Qumran scholar.
Shortly after the publication of The Dead Sea Scrolls in English in 1962, I was asked at a conference in London by an elderly cleric, ‘Young man, are you a relation of the Vermes who writes on the Dead Sea Scrolls?’
Some twenty years later, at a party in Oxford, an Israeli lady who acted as a part-time tourist guide at Qumran, exclaimed when she realized who I was: ‘But I thought Vermes was just a text book!’
Finally, the third episode took place in California in the 1990s. My wife and I were guests at a dinner in the Huntington Library in Pasadena, and we left five-year-old Ian with the daughter of William Moffett, the director of the Library and chief liberator of the Scrolls. Next morning she smilingly reported a conversation she had overheard between her son and Ian, two boys of similar age. ‘My grandad found the Dead Sea Scrolls,’ boasted the Moffett offspring. ‘Oh yeah,’ retorted Ian Vermes, ‘but my daddy wrotethem.’
Referring, equally lightheartedly, to this last episode on the occasion of my eightieth birthday, Professor Philip Alexander, formerly a student, later a colleague and collaborator, and always a dear friend of mine, flatteringly remarked: ‘It may be an exaggeration to claim that Geza Vermes wrote the Scrolls (unless, unknown to us, he is a reincarnation of the Teacher of Righteousness), but for tens of thousands around the world, both lay and academic, who have been enlightened by his translations of the texts, he is indisputably the man who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls in English.’