John Marco Allegro (born in London 17 February 1923;
died 17 February 1988, his 65th birthday) was a freethinker who challenged orthodox views of the
Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bible and the history of religion,
with books that attracted popular attention and scholarly derision.
After service in the Royal Navy during World War II, Allegro started to train for the
Methodist ministry but transferred to a degree in Oriental
Studies at the University of Manchester. In 1953 he was invited to
become the first British representative on the international team working on the recently
discovered Dead Sea Scrolls in Jordan. The following year he was appointed assistant lecturer in
Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester, and held a succession of lectureships there until he resigned in 1970 to become a
full-time writer. In 1961 he was made Honorary Adviser on the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Jordanian
government.
Allegro's thirteen books include The Dead Sea Scrolls (1956), The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (1960), The
Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979) as well as Discoveries
in the Judaean Desert of Jordan vol. V (1968) and articles in academic journals such as the Journal of Biblical
Literature, Palestine Exploration Quarterly and Journal of Semitic Studies [1], and in the popular press.
Access to the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls were written between 200 B.C.E. and 68 C.E., and give insight into the religious life and thought of a
Jewish sect based at Qumran by the Dead
Sea and usually identified as Essenes. Allegro believed the scrolls could help us
understand the common origin of three religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He hoped they might be able to bring together
scholars of each tradition in studying their common heritage without the barriers of religious prejudice.
This would mean making the texts accessible to all. Allegro published the sections of text allotted to him in academic
journals as soon as he had prepared them, and his volume (number five) in the official series Discoveries in the Judaean
Desert of Jordan was ready for the press by the early 1960s. He continually campaigned for the publication of all scroll
texts. However, his colleagues took a different approach, and little else appeared until 1991.
Allegro saw himself as a publicist for the scrolls. His books, talks and broadcasts promoted public interest in the scrolls
and their significance. At first, the rest of the team encouraged his efforts, which after all were intended to help fund their
research. But they thought he went too far in making assertions about the parallels between Essenism and Christianity which they thought were unsupported by evidence and designed to raise his personal
profile. He was accused of stirring up controversy at the expense of scholarship.
The Copper Scroll
The controversy over the Copper Scroll deepened the rift between Allegro and the team.
At the request of the authorities, Allegro had arranged for the scroll to be cut open in Manchester over the winter of 1955/56. He supervised the opening and made a preliminary transcription and
translation of the contents. He found it to be a list of Temple treasure hidden at various locations around Qumran and Jerusalem,
most probably after the sack of Jerusalem in AD 70. Initial excitement turned
to poison when the team accused Allegro of leaking information to the Press (which was denied) and later objected to his
pre-empting the official translation (in 1962) by publishing his own version first (in 1960). In Allegro's defense, it is
suggested the team had already issued a preliminary translation, and Allegro held his book back to try and let the official
version take precedence. But he could not in honesty support the official interpretation of the Copper Scroll as a work of
fiction, and some later scholars have endorsed his view that the treasure was real.[2]
Christian origins
Allegro believed that Essenism was the matrix of Christianity. He suggested that there were so
many correspondences between the scroll texts and the New Testament — words and phrases, beliefs and practices, Messianic
leadership, a teacher who was persecuted and possibly crucified — that he thought the derivation obvious. This brought him into
conflict with the Catholic priests on the editing team, and with most church spokesmen, who maintained the orthodox assumption
that the arrival of Jesus was the unique, historical, God-given event described in the
Gospels. Allegro also started to look in more depth at the way the New Testament appeared to weave together a mix of folklore,
myth, incantation and history.
Language, myth and religion
As a philologist, Allegro analysed the derivations of language. He traced biblical words
and phrases back to their roots in Sumerian, and showed how Sumerian phonemes recur in varying but related contexts in many Semitic, classical and
other Indo-European languages. Although meanings changed to some extent, Allegro
found some basic religious ideas passing on through the genealogy of words. His book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
relates the development of language on our continent to the development of myths, religions and cultic practices in many
cultures. Allegro believed he could prove through etymology that the roots of Christianity, as of many other religions, lay in
fertility cults; and that cultic practices, such as ingesting hallucinogenic drugs to perceive the mind of god, persisted into
Christian times.
The reaction to The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross ruined Allegro's career. His detractors found his somewhat
sensationalist approach deplorable and his arguments somewhere between unconvincing and ludicrous. The book received widespread
condemnation and has only been taken seriously by a handful of scholars[3]. Prof JND Anderson observed that the book "had been dismissed by ... experts...as not being based on
any philological or other evidence that they can regard as scholarly"[4]. However, there has been renewed interest in Allegro's work. Jan Irvin and Andrew Rutajit published
the book Astrotheology & Shamanism[5] in 2006,
which supported some of Allegro's ideas using iconographic and symbolic evidence that Allegro had overlooked. In their book,
Sumerian expert Anna Partington casts doubt on the broad brushed dismissals of Allegro's interpretations: "... SMC [The Sacred
Mushroom and the Cross] uses a number of hypothetical Sumerian words not attested in texts. These are marked with an asterisk
following philological convention. This is akin to proposing there is a word in the English language 'bellbat' because the
individual words 'bell' and 'bat' are known to exist separately. Then again words of different languages are gathered together
without the type of argument which would be expected in order to demonstrate possible relationship."[6] In May of 2006, Michael Hoffman of [www.egodeath.com] and Jan Irvin wrote
an article for The Journal of Higher Criticism[7]
entitled Wasson and Allegro on the Tree of Knowledge as Amanita [8] that suggested that Allegro's work should be evaluated on its merits like that of any other scholar
and not dismissed merely because its arguments fall outside the mainstream.
Allegro went on to write several other books exploring the roots of religion; notably The Dead Sea Scrolls and the
Christian Myth, which seek to relate Christian theology to Gnostic writings, classical mythology and Egyptian sun-worship in
the common quest for divine light.
It is suggested that Allegro believed the Dead Sea Scrolls raised issues that concerned everyone. It wasn't just a matter of
dusty manuscripts and disputed translations. Rather, the story of the scrolls raised questions about freedom of access to
evidence, freedom of speech, and freedom to challenge orthodox religious views.
Allegro believed that through understanding the origins of religion people could be freed from its bonds to think for themselves
and take responsibility for their own judgments.
Notes and references
- ^ 'A Newly Discovered Fragment of Commentary on Psalm 37 from Qumran,'
Palestine Exploration Quarterly 86 (1954): 69-75
'Further Light on the History of the Qumran Sect', Journal of Biblical Literature75 (1956): 93
'Further Messianic References in Qumran Literature', Journal of Biblical Literature 75 (1956), pp. 174-76
'More Isaiah Commentaries from Qumran's Fourth Cave', Journal of Biblical Literature 77 (September 1958) 215-221
'Fragments of a Qumran Scroll of Eschatological Midrashim', Journal of Biblical Literature 75 (December 1956): 182-187; and 77
(December 1958): 350-354
'A Recently Discovered Fragment of a Commentary on Hosea from Qumran's Fourth Cave', Journal of Biblical Literature 78 (June
1959): 142-147
'An Unpublished Fragment of Essene Halakhah (4Q Ordinances)', Journal of Semitic Studies 6 (1961): 71-73
'More Unpublished Pieces of a Qumran Commentary on Nahum (4QpNah)', Journal of Semitic Studies 7 (1962): 304-308
'"The Wiles of the Wicked Woman", a Sapiential Work from Qumran's Fourth Cave', Palestine Exploration Quarterly 96 (1964)
53-55
'An Astrological Cryptic Document from Qumran', Journal of Semitic Studies 9 (1964): 291-294'Some Unpublished Fragments of
Pseudepigraphical Literature from Qumran's Fourth Cave', Annual of Leeds University Oriental Society IV (1962-3), Leiden, 1964:
3-4
- ^ Lefkovits, Judah K. (2000) The Copper Scroll 3Q15: A Reevaluation, Leiden:
Brill. ISBN 0169 9962 Knohl, I; Wise, M; et al., in Brooke, G. J. and Davies, P. R. (ed.) (2002) Copper Scroll Studies,
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 0 82646 055 0.
- ^ Even 36 years later the book is cited just 19 times in Google Scholar and
mostly as a passing reference in pharmacology works google
scholar hits
- ^ JND Anderson Christianity, the Witness of History London:Tyndale
(1970) p 15. Cited by Jurgen Habermas in Did Christianity Arise Out of the Mystery
Religions? here
- ^ Astrotheology & Shamanism by Jan Irvin and Andrew Rutajit, 2006 - ISBN
1-58509-107-3
- ^ Astrotheology & Shamanism by Jan Irvin and Andrew Rutajit, 2006, pg.
55.
- ^ Journal of Higher Criticism, 2006, ed. by Dr. Robert Price - http://atheistalliance.org/jhc/
- ^ http://www.egodeath.com/WassonEdenTree.htm
- Original article Sourced with permission from: John Marco Allegro, the Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Judith Anne Brown;
pb. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, 2005.
See also
External links
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