Roland de Vaux

Roland Guérin de Vaux OP (17 December 1903 – 10 September 1971) was a French Dominican priest who led the Catholic team that initially worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He was the director of the École Biblique, a French Catholic Theological School in East Jerusalem, and he was charged with overseeing research on the scrolls.

He became interested in archaeological studies while living in Jerusalem, learning as he went from people such as William F. Albright, Kathleen Kenyon and Benjamin Mazar.

[1] He had worked on several excavations when Gerald Lankester Harding, the director of the Jordanian Antiquities Department, contacted him in 1947 to investigate a cave near the Dead Sea where some scrolls had been found.

In their work The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh heavily criticized de Vaux, describing him as "ruthless, narrow-minded, bigoted and fiercely vindictive," anti-semitic and a fascist sympathizer.

[5] The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception has, in turn, been denounced by scholars as consisting largely of a "pattern of errors and misinformed statements".