Geza Vermes

Geza Vermes, who has died at the age of 88, was an outstanding scholar whose vast knowledge of the history of Judaism at the time of Christ, and the Jewish background of early Christianity, had an immense influence on biblical scholarship. He liked to describe his colourful life and distinguished career as a series of providential accidents, the title he gave to his autobiography.

Prof Vermes was born in Hungary, and while still at school, decided to study for the priesthood. His intellectual calibre was recognised by the religious order he joined that sent him to Louvain where he planned to study theology and semitic languages and history. In his doctoral thesis he abandoned his previous belief that the Dead Sea Scrolls were a product of the second half of the first century, and argued that they belonged to the middle of the second century BC. His supervisor was unconvinced but, Prof Vermes wrote later "he was not to know that this brainwave of a research student would soon become the standard opinion among scholars; it remains so to this day".

He had to leave the priesthood in 1955 when he fell in love with Pam Bradbourne, the wife of a professor at Exeter. He was appointed lecturer at Newcastle University in 1957, and in 1962 he published the first edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls in English. In 1965 he moved to Oxford as Reader in Jewish Studies and in 1973 published Jesus the Jew. "The Jewishness of Jesus," he later wrote, "is now axiomatic whereas in 1973 the title of my book was still capable of sending shock waves across many a sector of the traditional Christian world."

Prof Vermes published a series of books in which he recorded his developing understanding of the Jewishness and the religion of Jesus. These culminated in studies of the main, crucial aspects of Christianity's beliefs about Jesus: his birth, his trial and the reports of his resurrection. While immensely sympathetic to Jesus and his message, Professor Vermes ultimately rejected the view of Jesus's resurrection as physical. He preferred to see it as a way of describing the experience of the first Christians that Jesus was alive in their hearts.

Prof Vermes's religious life has been described as defying easy categorisation. He was a member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue but did not commit himself to any particular expression of Judaism today.

His marriage to Pam was extremely happy. For 35 years she not only provided the domestic stability but also contributed to his work, not least by improving his English style and sharing his editorial responsibility for the Journal of Jewish Studies which, under Prof Vermes, established an international reputation for Jewish historical and literary scholarship. Pam died in 1993 and two years later, Geza Vermes married Margaret, a scientist and native of Cracow, who brought to the marriage a son and two daughters. He wrote: "They are the source of my still flowing energy in the late afternoon sunshine."

Prof Vermez received a raft of honorary degrees, one of them from the University of Edinburgh. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2009 the United States House of Representatives congratulated him for inspiring and educating the world. However alongside all his academic distinctions, he was just as proud of his appearance on Desert Island discs. He is survived by his wife Margaret, a stepson and two stepdaughters.