Józef Milik

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Józef Tadeusz Milik (March 24, 1922 - January 6, 2006) was a Polish Catholic priest and Biblical scholar. Fluent in Polish, Russian, Italian, French, German, and English plus many ancient languages. Milik published more texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) than any other original team member; nevertheless, since he did not complete all the work on his portion, he is assigned a major share of the blame for the Scrolls not being published for almost forty years.

[edit] Milestones

1944 Entered Catholic University of Lublin to study Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, & Old Church Slavonic
1946 Ordained as a Catholic priest in Warsaw
Late-1940s Attended Pontifical Oriental Institute and Pontifical Biblical Institute to study Arabic, Georgian, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, and Hittite
1950 Gained a licentiate summa cum laude
1951 Began working in Jerusalem to decipher DSS; devised a system of designating the fragments
1955 Co-edited first major DSS publication for Cave 1 texts: "Discoveries in the Judaean Desert"
1956 Heralded by Time magazine as "the fastest man with a fragment"
1959 Published "Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea" describing the DSS discovery (revision and translation of the 1957 book "Dix ans de découvertes dans le Désert de Juda")
1969 Left priesthood, married, and moved to Paris
1976 Published "The Books of Enoch"