John Strugnell

John Strugnell (May 25, 1930 – November 30, 2007) was born in Barnet, Hertfordshire, UK. At the age of 23 he became the youngest member of the team of scholars led by Roland de Vaux, formed in 1954 to edit the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem. He was studying Oriental languages at Jesus College, Oxford when Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver, a lecturer in Semitic philology, nominated him to join the Scrolls editorial team. Although Strugnell had no previous experience in palaeography he learned very quickly to read the scrolls. He would be involved in the Dead Sea Scrolls project for more than forty years. John Strugnell died in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 30, 2007.

Strugnell was educated at St. Paul's School in London. He took a double first in Classics and Semitics at Oxford but never finished his dissertation and only held a master's degree. Despite not having completed his doctorate, Strugnell was given a position at the Oriental Institute of Chicago in 1956-1957, where he met his future wife, Cecile Pierlot, whose father had been Prime Minister of Belgium during the Second World War. He was away from his scrolls again from 1960 to 1967, this time at Duke University, though he returned in summers to continue his efforts in Jerusalem. Still without his doctorate, as he would be for the rest of his life, Strugnell served from 1966-1991 as Professor of Christian Origins at Harvard. He succeeded Pierre Benoit as editor-in-chief of the scrolls in 1984, a position he held until 1990. During this period he was responsible for bringing Elisha Qimron and Emanuel Tov to work on the scrolls, breaking the longstanding exclusion of Israeli scholars. At the same time, he kept notable scholars such as Theodor Gaster and Robert Eisenman from having access to the scrolls, a situation that was rectified when Strugnell was removed from his post and the scrolls (such as those at the Huntington Library in California) were opened to the wider scholarly community for the first time.

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