The Dead Sea scrolls consists of about 900 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the Qumran Wadi near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.
Professor Vermes is one of the first scholars to examine the Dead Sea Scrolls after their discovery in 1947, and the author of the standard translation into English of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 1962, re-issued in London by Penguin Classics, as The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 2004).

Geza Vermes is a Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He has edited the Journal of Jewish Studies since 1971, and since 1991 he has been director of the Oxford Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.