He became the first American scholar to see fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Spring of 1948. At the time Trever was filling in for Millar Burrows, the director at the American Schools of Oriental Research. He was contacted by a representative of
Mar Samuel of St. Mark's Assyrian Orthodox Monastery who desired to authenticate three scrolls that we now know had been purchased from Kando, a Syrian-Christian antiquities dealer in
Bethlehem. Trever, an experienced photographer, photographed the scrolls,
Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaiahA),
Habakkuk Commentary (1QpHabukkuk), and
Community Rule (1QS), and immediately sent copies to Near East scholar
William F. Albright, who recognized them as the "greatest MS discovery of modern times!” Trever is the author of
The Untold Story of Qumran (1965) and
The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Personal Account (2003). He taught at several colleges: Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio, Morris Harvey College in West Virginia (the University of Charleston), and
Claremont School of Theology in California. The original negatives are in the collection of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center of the Claremont School of Theology in California. ==Selected works==