All John Trever intended to do was to study and photograph the plants of the Holy Land.
But a telephone call on February 18, 1948, changed the young Methodist scholar's life—and the course of biblical studies—forever. The next day Butrus Sowmy of St. Mark's Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Jerusalem brought Trever a scroll that the monastery had acquired. Could he identify the manuscript and determine its age?
"Laying the heavy document on my bed, slowly I began to open it. A sheet of leather, containing two columns of text, had become detached from the rest of the document. The linen thread used to bind the sheets together had disintegrated. On the left edge the text was badly blurred by someone who had attempted to re-ink many letters which had been worn away by handling. Obviously this was the end of the scroll. It had been rolled backwards, with the last column on the outside. I continued to unroll another six to eight columns.
"Here was not what I had expected! The script was ...
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