John C. Trever
Acting director of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). He was the first scholar to realize the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Dead Sea Scrolls
On February 18, 1948, Butrus Sowmy, librarian and monk of Saint Mark's Syrian Orthodox Monastery in the Armenian quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, called John C. Trever about some scrolls in ancient Hebrew that had been in the monastery for about 40 years as he was preparing a catalogue of the monastery's collection of rare books.
Sowmy and his brother brought five scrolls to Trever the next day. Trever copied lines from the first scroll, containing writing in a clear square Hebrew script, examined three others, and declined to unroll the fifth due to how brittle it was. Trevor shared the story with ASOR fellow, William H. Brownlee, noting his transcribed double occurrence of an unusual negative construction in Hebrew and the script being more archaic than anything he had seen.
Trever visited Saint Mark's Monastery and was introduced to the Syrian Archbishop Athanasius Samuel and obtained permission to photograph the scrolls. Trever and Brownlee compared the style of the handwriting to the Nash Papyrus.
When the ASOR director Millar Burrows returned from Baghdad a few days later, he joined the study. At this point, the Syrians revealed the scrolls had been purchased in 1947, the year before, and had not been in the monastery for 40 years.
(The Origin of the Bible: Newly Updated by F. F. Bruce, J. I. Packer, Philip W. Comfort, and Carl F. H. Henry, 2020. Texts and Manuscripts of the Old Testament by Mark R. Norton, Page 161-162)