Professor John Strugnell: Dead Sea Scrolls project editor

John Strugnell, biblical scholar: born Barnet, Hertfordshire 25 May 1930; Professor of Christian Origins, Harvard Divinity School 1968-96 (Emeritus); editor-in-chief, Dead Sea Scrolls project 1984-90; married 1958 Ccile Pierlot (two sons, three daughters; marriage dissolved); died Cambridge, Massachusetts 30 November 2007.

When knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls burst on the world in the late 1940s, it was the dream of every scholar in the field to be allowed to work on this extraordinary treasure trove of early Jewish manuscripts. John Strugnell, a promising scholar who had completed a BA and MA in Oriental languages at Jesus College, Oxford, was proposed by his tutor Godfrey Driver to join the team. Suspending work on his PhD, Strugnell arrived in east Jerusalem in 1954.

Working in the famous Scrollery in the Palestine Archaeological Museum, he helped piece together, decipher and transcribe the fragments that were still emerging from caves in Qumran in the Judaean hills close to the Dead Sea. Not only did the fragments reveal the life of the Essene community which produced them, they shed light on late Second Temple Judaism and the religious world in which Christianity would emerge.

Strugnell took a job in 1956 at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, then worked in Jerusalem again before taking a position at Duke University in North Carolina in 1960, although he would spend summers in the Scrollery. Remarkably for a scholar who never completed his PhD, Strugnell was appointed to the faculty of the Harvard Divinity School in 1966, later becoming Professor of Christian Origins.

Strugnell played a significant part in deciphering and eventually publishing an Essene summary of biblical law (4QMMT), some Essene liturgical songs (4Q403) and a long wisdom text (4QInstruction). But although his publication of original texts was sparse, he contributed in other ways to the study of the hoard of manuscripts. Four years after the publication in 1965 of the earliest manuscript of Sirach (the first-century BC scroll from Masada), he published an important 11-page article offering better readings of the original scroll.

When his fellow team member John Allegro published some Qumran texts, mostly Essene commentaries on the prophets, in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert in 1968, Strugnell did a review that was longer than Allegro's original publication and is regarded as more authoritative.

In 1984 Strugnell was appointed as editor-in-chief of the Scrolls project something of a poisoned chalice. By now conspiracy theories were mushrooming over the embarrassing delays in publishing material, the alleged discrimination over the initial failure to appoint Jews to the team, and the team's refusal to allow independent scholars access to the unpublished documents.

Some saw a Vatican-led conspiracy to suppress texts which could undermine the Christian story. Others most notably one of the original team members, Allegro came up with ever more bizarre interpretations of the texts.

Strugnell maintained the team's exclusive hold over the texts, but brought in more scholars to speed up the publication, including women. Confounding those espousing a Vatican, anti-Semitic conspiracy, three of the scholars Elisha Qimron, Emanuel Tov and Devorah Dimant were Jewish.

But all this was to come crashing down when Strugnell by now divorced, suffering from alcoholism and manic depression gave an interview while in Jerusalem in 1990 to the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha'aretz. "It's a horrible religion," the paper quoted him as saying of Judaism. "It's Christian heresy, and we deal with our heretics in different ways."

Despite his protestations that his comments did not represent his true beliefs and that he was not anti-Semitic, plus the defence of other scholars around the world, both Jewish and non-Jewish, Strugnell's position as leader of the project became untenable. In late 1990 his colleagues voted him out and the Israel Antiquities Authority removed him that New Year's Eve. He was hospitalised in the United States for a time.

But to the gratitude of many graduate students, Strugnell continued to supervise (often unpaid) many who would become prominent scholars in ancient Hebrew and early Christian studies, even after suffering a stroke in 2001. Almost universally, they praised his openness, generosity with his ideas and time and dedication to scholarship. One Jewish student, while noting Strugnell's "complex views" of Judaism, recalled that he treated him "as well as any professor I have ever known".

Indeed, Strugnell regarded teaching and supervising as his life's work. "My students are my legacy," he would say.

Felix Corley