John Allegro
From Philosopedia
Allegro, John (1923—1988)
Allegro, an eminent Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, edited some of the most important of the Essene documents, including the biblical commentaries. He is author of The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1984), in which he states that the Catholic Church deleted, changed, or suppressed large amounts of the newly found material. The Church also tried to hide the Nag Hammadi library materials discovered in Egypt, because of the Gnostic writings which helped undermine the entire basis of Christian beliefs. John 8:44 is one example of the Gnostic influence, and other Gnostic writings describe homosexual overtones in a particular form of baptism which Jesus knew about but which the Church sought to hide. In the 1984 work, Allegro wrote
- Unlike the Jewish Talmudist or “fundamentalist” Christian, the old-time Bible-thumper, we cannot seek in any traditional revelation a detailed code of rules of conduct; we are in the last resort thrown back upon our own inadequate selves for our authoring.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1992), point out that Allegro, of the original team members, was the only disinterested scholar of religion. The others were Roman Catholic theologians. Chosen because he was one of Britain’s foremost authorities on Middle Eastern languages, Allegro soon found he was denied access to some materials and was not allowed to attend important conferences.
After Allegro published material stating that “the origins of some Christian ritual and doctrines can be seen in the documents of an extremist Jewish sect that existed for more than 100 years before the birth of Jesus Christ,” he was discredited by his colleagues, was called anti-Christian, and was removed from the project. He insisted, however, that the ancient myths were being misrepresented as historical fact by the church. Baigent and Leigh, similarly, imply that despite the team’s international character it was highly influenced by the Vatican from the beginning.
Allegro was ridiculed for his theory, expressed in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), that Western religions were based on mushroom worship. The volume studied the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East, and he contended that Judaism and Christianity were products of an ancient sex-and-mushroom cult.
“The bearing of the phallus was a marked feature of the Dionysiac processionals,” he wrote, “but as we now know, it had more than a purely physiological significance." The penis was not only the sign of human generation but within the mushroom cult it symbolized the sacred fungus itself, the “phallus of God.” The book contains color photos of the mushroom, Amanita muscaria, and after 205 pages it appends 150 pages of notes in various languages, illustrating his erudition and interest in philology.
S. Levin, commenting upon Allegro’s suspicion that the whole Paul-Jesus story was somehow tied up with a fungus tale, a mushroom hallucinatory story, has written of The End of a Road (1971) that “in complex philosophical philandering around semen, penis and vulva, he mushroomed everything and everybody into a fungus yarn. Peter was pitriya (Hebrew for fungus), Jonah’s overhanging bush was a mushroom, and so was Jesus. (Allegro) was rightly attacked as way off the historical mark.” However, Levin adds that “Christianity began somewhere in those Greek regions [Ephesus, Tarsus, etc.], and as a consequence of a rumour heard by Paul, and fleshed into brilliance by the effects of LSD.”
{Free Inquiry, Fall 1984; New Humanist, February 1996; TRI}
