How a Scroll Scholar Went Bad

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John Strugnell, a chief editor of the Dead Sea Scroll publication team, called him “the stone in the soup.” Harvard’s Frank Cross, another member of the team, said he was a charlatan.

At 23, John Marco Allegro was a probationer of the Methodist ministry. He preached sermons, led hymns and discussions and visited the sick. Academically he was the star of the Semitics department of Manchester University. But his study of the Bible and its linguistics shook his religious faith, and he decided that an academic career was a good way out of the ministry. Then, at the recommendation of Sir Godfrey Driver, his new mentor at Oxford, the young scholar was appointed to the Dead Sea Scroll publication team, arriving in Jerusalem in the fall of 1953. At first all seemed to go well. “We really are an ideally suited team,” he wrote his wife in 1954, “and this makes life very pleasant.”

Within a year Allegro began writing a book on the scrolls, gradually but increasingly convinced that there was a direct relationship between the scrolls and Christianity. In his words, Christianity was nothing more than “a kind of neo-Essenism stemming directly from the people of the scrolls.” Similar views were propagated by several other scholars, most notably the French academician André Dupont-Sommer, and more popularly by the immensely influential critic Edmund Wilson in The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, based on his articles in The New Yorker. But it was not a view shared by his fellow scholars on the publication team (nor by scholars today). Moreover, Allegro adopted a more public stance than the other members of the team, lecturing, writing and speaking to the press.

The first major breach between Allegro and the other members of the publication team occurred after January 1956, when Allegro gave three 15-minute talks on BBC radio. In the last he declared that the Teacher of Righteousness, the leader of the sect of Essenes at Qumran, home of the scrolls, had been dragged from his simple abode and was crucified by the Wicked Priest, whom he identified as the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus. “When the Jewish king had left,” Allegro said on the air:

and peace descended once more on Qumran, the scattered community returned and took down the broken body of their Master … They believed that the terrible events of their time were surely heralding the Visitation of God Himself, when the enemies of Truth would be scattered and the Kingdom of Heaven come on earth. In that glorious day they believed that their Master would rise again, and lead his faithful flock, the people of the New Testament, as they called themselves, to a new and purified Jerusalem.¹

The other members of the publication team were furious at the broadcast. This was not how they interpreted the scrolls at all. Five members of the team wrote a letter to The London Times:

We are unable to see in the texts the “findings” of Mr. Allegro. We find no crucifixion of the “teacher,” no deposition from the cross, and no “broken body of their Master” to be stood guard over until Judgment Day. There is no “well-defined Essenic pattern into which Jesus of Nazareth fits,” as Mr. Allegro is alleged in one report to have said.²

The rift between Allegro and the other team members deepened (if that were possible) over the mysterious Copper Scroll. With the team’s agreement, Allegro had taken the two rolls of the scroll to Manchester in the hope that there they could be opened and read. The publication of the text, however, had been assigned to a more senior and experienced scholar (Father Josef Milik), not Allegro. But when technicians in Manchester managed to open the scroll, Allegro was the first to see the text—a list of 65 sites whose location is only vaguely described, each of which is said to contain enormous quantities of buried treasure.

Allegro believed that these were real sites, where real treasure was (or had been) buried. Other members of the team 053took the position, however, that these were fictitious, mythical designations. Whether the team really believed this or took this position to stave off treasure hunters is unclear. Today, however, almost everyone agrees with Allegro that the Copper Scroll describes real sites of real buried treasure.

To make matters worse, Allegro set about to explore the sites in the hope of finding the treasure. (He was unsuccessful, however, as noted in “Hyrcania’s Mysterious Tunnels”.)

Despite Allegro’s urging the publication team to release the text of the Copper Scroll, they were unwilling to do so until a detailed commentary could be completed by Milik. Finally, three years after he had himself transcribed the text, Allegro published his own highly successful book on the Copper Scroll. This deeply offended the then-rules of scholarly cricket: By publishing the text, he was charged with “pirating,” “stealing” the Copper Scroll.

When Allegro published the Dead Sea Scroll texts actually assigned to him, the volume was heavily criticized as incompetent. An article by colleague John Strugnell detailing Allegro’s errors was longer than the book being criticized.

No longer on the publication team, Allegro went on to publish his most extravagant book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Allegro described its concept:

The most important thing in life was life itself, and life is rain … Rain begets vegetation on the earth … God, the Creator, the source of rain, must therefore be the sperm of creation and the heavenly penis from which it spills. The storm is the orgasm of God.³

In the book, Allegro describes Christianity as “only a latter-day manifestation of a religious movement that had been in existence for thousands of years, and in that particular mystery-cult form for centuries.” The ancient mystery cults out of which Christianity grew “depended for their mystic hallucinatory experiences on the drugs found in the fungus [Amanita muscaria].”

The New Testament, he went on, was a “hoax” designed to “transmit to the scattered faithful secrets [regarding the mysteries induced by the sacred mushroom] which the Christians dare not permit to fall into unauthorized hands but to whose preservation they were irrevocably committed by sacred oaths.” Christianity’s “surface story,” however, “knows nothing ostensibly of mushroom cults.”⁴

After this, Allegro would never again be taken seriously. His career ruined, Allegro ultimately moved with his family to the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. Soon bored with the isolation, however, he began taking increasingly longer trips to England, where he purportedly needed the libraries to pursue his research. The truth, however, was that he had become priapic. His many liaisons with young women were short but inevitably corrosive to his relations with his wife. Eventually they permanently separated. Allegro died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm in 1988 on his 65th birthday.

In this largely sympathetic biography, Allegro’s daughter gives a fair summary of her father’s ideas and the controversies in which his life was enmeshed. She obviously loves and admires him, while at the same time recognizes his faults. She frankly admits that he was guilty of “deliberate provocation” and “over-simplification.” But she also laments her father’s “wasted genius.”

If he was wrong about the scrolls’ relationship to Christianity, he was right about the nature of the Copper Scroll—and he was right in harshly criticizing the publication team’s refusal to release the text for years after it had been opened and transcribed. If his “hoax” theory of Christianity “seems fantastic,” she says, “so does the tale of the god-man with supernatural powers that millions of Christians have swallowed over the centuries.”

And she clearly feels for her mother, who loyally supported her husband in his years of scholarly travail only to be abandoned by him later.

Most of the footnotes in the book are citations to letters Allegro wrote. He apparently was careful to keep copies, and these are a rich source of insight into Allegro’s thought and character. Many fewer letters sent to him are cited by the author. Perhaps he did not keep all of them—or they were destroyed. Interestingly, Ms. Brown does note that after his death, the family destroyed boxes of letters to and from the young women with whom he had had sexual liaisons. But what of letters from colleagues, including those on the Dead Sea Scrolls publication team, that he had received earlier? Were there more? If so, were they destroyed? And if so, when and by whom? I suspect that letters to Allegro from colleagues would also be a rich source of enlightenment. Too bad we weren’t given more of them. Nevertheless, what we do have here is a new and often fascinating window into the lore and lure of the Dead Sea Scrolls.—H.S.

Photo of John Marco Allegro courtesy of Judith Anne Brown.

John Strugnell, a chief editor of the Dead Sea Scroll publication team, called him “the stone in the soup.” Harvard’s Frank Cross, another member of the team, said he was a charlatan.