John C. Trever

John C. Trever (November 26 1916 - April 29 2006, California) was the first American scholar to see fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Spring of 1948. Trever was filling in for Millar Burrows, the director at the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, when a call came from a representative of Mar Samuel who desired to authenticate three scrolls that we now know had been purchased from Kando, a Syrian-Christian antiquities dealer. Trever photographed the scrolls, 1QIsaiahA, 1QpHabukkuk, and 1QS, and immediately sent copies to his mentor--famed Near East scholar William F. Albright, who congratulated him on the "greatest MS discovery of modern times!”

Trever is the author of "The Untold Story of Qumran" (1965) and "The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Personal Account" (2003). He taught at several colleges: Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio, Morris Harvey College in West Virginia (the University of Charleston), and Claremont School of Theology in California.

The original negatives are in the collection of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center of the Claremont School of Theology in California.

References

*Abegg, Martin. "John C. Trever."Biblical Archaeology Review", September/October, 2006.
*Shanks, Hershel. Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.