Some critics have pointed out that Szekely, after originally publishing a French translation, first published it in English in 1937 as "The gospel of peace of Jesus Christ by the disciple John". After the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s and intense public interest in the Essenes, Szekely republished an updated version as "The Essene Gospel of John". The scrolls appearing on the title page of later editions are not the manuscripts Szekely claimed to translate, but a reversed image of a Dead Sea Scroll from Professor Millar Burrows "The Dead Sea Scrolls", published in 1958.