John Strugnell - Aftermath

Aftermath

Strugnell had come increasingly under controversy for his slow progress in publishing the scrolls, and his refusal to give scholars free access to the unpublished scrolls. Some argue the removal of Strugnell from his editorial post ended the more than three-decade blockade that he and other Harvard-educated scholars, such as Notre Dame's Eugene Ulrich, had maintained to keep other scholars from accessing the scrolls. The blockade on the publication of the scrolls effected by Strugnell and other members of Harvard's academic community was broken by the combined efforts of Hershel Shanks of the Biblical Archaeology Review (who had personally waged a 15-year campaign to release the scrolls) and Ben Zion Wacholder of Hebrew Union College, along with his student, Martin Abegg, who published the first facsimile of the suppressed scrolls in 1991. Strugnell insisted that he tried to publish the scrolls as quickly as he could but that his team was the limiting factor.

Shortly after Strugnell was dismissed from his post, he was institutionalized in McLean Hospital for a period. At the time of his death he was Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Divinity School.