John Marco Allegro (born in London 17 February 1923, died 17 February 1988) was a freethinker who challenged orthodox views on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bible and the history of religion.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.John Allegro believed that Essenism was the matrix of Christianity. 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 suggested it might be less unique and miraculous than they said. He 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, and to ask why.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 brought new light to many of Allegro's ideas through 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." In May of 2006, Michael Hoffman of [ www.egodeath.com ] wrote an article for The Journal of Higher Criticism entitled Wasson and Allegro on the Tree of Knowledge as Amanita that also brought serious doubt against many of Allegro's detractors.
Amanita MuscariaAllegro 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. This has only been cited 5 times since publication in 1984.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 judgements.[Sourced from: John Marco Allegro, the Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Judith Anne Brown; pb. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, 2005.]http://www.johnallegro.org/main/http://en.wikipedia.or g/wiki/John_Marco_Allegrohttp://virtualreligion.net/iho/alle gro.html
