The Passing of Geza Vermes, 1924 - 2013.
Jim Davila has learned that Geza Vermes died this morning. Here is a short bio I found on Wikipedia which seems to have already been updated.
Vermes was
born in Makó, Hungary, in 1924 to Jewish parents.
All three were baptised as Roman Catholics when he was seven. His mother and journalist father died in the Holocaust. After the Second World War, he became a Roman
Catholic priest, studied first in Budapest and then at the College St Albert and
the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, where he read Oriental history and languages and in 1953
obtained a doctorate in theology with a dissertation on the historical
framework of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He left the Catholic Church in 1957; and, reasserting
his Jewish identity, came to Britain and took up a teaching post at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He
married Pamela Hobson in 1958. In 1965 he joined the Faculty of Oriental
Studies at Oxford University, rising to become
the first professor of Jewish Studies before his retirement in 1991. In 1970 he became a member
of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue of London.
Vermes passed away on 8 May 2013 after a
recurrence of cancer.
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