![]() He resumed his studies for the priesthood, but as ordination approached, the thought of parish ministry appealed to him less and less. With the aid of the church Vermes managed to remain hidden, and was liberated by the Red Army in Budapest in December 1944. Vermes's parents perished – exactly when, where and how he never discovered. 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". ![]() Turned down by the Jesuits, he was accepted by the diocese of Nagyvárad, and began life as a seminarian. Entering the priesthood offered a way forward. ![]() Vermes was desperate to further his education but saw little chance, as a Jew, of gaining a place at university. The family's baptismal certificates proved useless to protect them. It was 1942 and life was becoming increasingly difficult for Hungarian Jews. Vermes also seems to have taken it seriously enough to consider becoming a priest, when he graduated from the Catholic gymnasium. That may have been his father's intention, but his mother took the conversion seriously and became a devout Catholic. When the family moved to Gyula, Vermes was enrolled in a Catholic primary school, and the family converted to Catholicism – "to give me a better chance", as he wrote in his autobiography. His mother, Terézia, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Erno, a journalist and poet who associated with leading Hungarian intellectuals. He was born in Makó, Hungary, to assimilated Jewish parents. Vermes himself never saw grounds for modifying it throughout his career. It was a brilliant hypothesis which gained many adherents and became academic orthodoxy. ![]() Wildly fluctuating dates were assigned to them, some even claiming that they had been copied in the middle ages.įrom careful analysis of the published material, Vermes argued that the Jewish sect behind the scrolls originated at the time of the Maccabean crisis in the middle of the second century BCE. No scholarly consensus had yet emerged as to when the scrolls were written, or by whom. These were published rapidly, but reports kept circulating that more caves containing more manuscripts were being found. In 1947, an Arab shepherd had chanced upon the first scrolls – texts written in ancient Hebrew and its sister language Aramaic – in a cave in the cliffs along the north-west shore of the Dead Sea. In the early 1950s he completed the first-ever doctorate on the Dead Sea Scrolls – a risky topic to choose. Geza Vermes, who has died aged 88, was one of the world's leading authorities on the origins of Christianity. ![]()
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