John Marco Allegro: The Maverick Of The Dead Sea Scrolls

by Judith Anne Brown

This book is the first to fully explore the life and ideas of John Marco Allegro (1923–1988), freethinker and rebel, whose work on the Dead Sea Scrolls led him to challenge the church, the team of scholars in charge of editing the Scrolls, and most conventional assumptions about the development of Christianity. As the first British member of the Scrolls editing team, Allegro shared the excitement, the insights, and the eyestrain of deciphering these invaluable ancient fragments. He made it possible for the Copper Scroll to be opened in Manchester and did much to focus worldwide attention on the Scrolls as a whole. But he made his name — or gained his notoriety — from questioning orthodox assumptions about how Christianity began. Allegro's views soon set him apart from fellow Scrolls scholars and even from the church itself. He asked questions that many people found disturbing if not outrageous. He wondered, for example, about the interweaving of history, myth, faith, and tradition in the New Testament, and about the nature of the church's authority. Allegro went on challenging the establishment all his life, and he relished the arguments he provoked. For over thirty years he campaigned for open access to the Scrolls and for wider debate about their significance. To him it was a campaign for free speech and free opinion. Judith Anne Brown's John Marco Allegro is a fascinating, probing, inside account of this man of ideas who was independent, irrepressible, and, above all, always original. Making extensive use of Allegro's letters, lecture notes, draft manuscripts, and other previously unpublished writings, Brown brings to life anew the extraordinary discoveries and debates that began in the caves by the Dead Sea over half a century ago.

Genres: Biography

288 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2005

Reviews

[Tony Sunderland · Rating 5 out of 5]

An honest tribute to one of the great individuals of the 20th century. John Allegro was a man of his time!
The work of John Allegro made the link between the existential crisis of the twentieth century and an alternative religious tradition that was already deeply embedded in the collective memory of Western culture. In recent years, some scholars have been prepared to revisit Allegro’s assumptions and his theories are beginning to gain a degree of academic traction.
John Allegro had close contact with all three of the great ancient texts of Christianity – the Bible, the Dead Sea scrolls and the Nag Hammadi cache. He was an independent philologist who was also prepared to be a man of his time. Although religious scholars scorned him and other independent scholars were sceptical of his conclusions, Allegro at least tried to find uniformity in religions and religious beliefs across time and culture. As his biographer (and daughter) put it,

There is compassion. God or no God, technology or failed technology, there is a quest for understanding, and there is love. These remain whatever politicians do to each other’s nations, or the churches do to religion, or critics do to the churches. They are the best of human qualities. The Christian myth, like other myths, can point the way, but for people like John who look behind the myths, source of inner light is inside man and woman.

[Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

This attempted hagiography of Allegro winds up backfiring badly, depicting a miserable, nasty man who became utterly unhinged by his hatred of religion. If you want a concise summary of just how bonkers Allegro was, consider that his big theory asserted (based on bad philology and worse anthropology) that Jesus wasn't a real person but was invented as kind of a personification of a psychedelic mushroom by a drug-fueled sex cult. Allegro's main achievement with the Dead Sea Scrolls team was supervising the opening of the Copper Scroll and his work on pesher fragments (although his Cave 4 work was so shoddy it required an article almost as long as the book to correct all the errors), but the rest of his life reads like a particularly sordid chapter from a Dan Brown novel. The book itself is indifferently written and the author (Allegro's daughter) appears to hate religion as much as her father did. How this trash found its way into the Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls & Related Literature series is a mystery as baffling as one of Allegro's bizarre theories. I mostly read it to see if it gave any real insight into the rapid collapse of a scholar who once showed potential. It did that in spades, revealing, I think, far more than the author intended. I walked away from it feeling kind of gross.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross" a few years ago and this was given to me along with it.

The history behind the work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Allegro's involvement was really interesting to learn about and I enjoyed plowing through this the week of my Spring Break.

I realize it has the bias of being written by his daughter so it may be in a more "positive" light but it seems like most publicity was generally stacked against him in his life so this may be a fair way of approach.

[jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have an interest in the "Dead Sea Scrolls" this book on John Marco Allegro will augment your knowledge with an inside look at one of the members (Allegro) of the original team of scholars assembled and assigned the task of making sense of the cache--that major chunk of the biography tells the whole story of DSS discovery, acquisition, etc. The biography is the work of Allegro's daughter, fairly told and constructed with the trove of Allegro's correspondence and letters. It's well written and documented. Allegro was a brilliant scholar and a tragic figure--his career unraveled as, some might say, Allegro did, tumbling into disrepute due to fantastic philological and philosophical hypotheses of biblical interpretation and intrigue (of Dan Brown-like proportion). To put it plainly, it's a great read that gets very hard to finish at the bittern end. Practically, and positively, it continues to serve as a reference and supplement to my library on DSS and its early and foundational story.

[Evan Mantri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written. Great stories, incredible topics.