The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

intended to accelerate the tempo of scroll research by injecting an element of excitement and controversy. ‘I think we can look for fireworks’, he wrote imprudently to John Strugnell, who was then in Jerusalem.⁹ That statement, as Allegro failed to appreciate, was bound to set alarm bells ringing in the Catholic-dominated ‘Scrollery’. Oblivious of this, he went on to say that ‘recent study of my fragments has convinced me that Dupont- Sommer is more right than he knew’.¹⁰ At the time, apparently, Strugnell was considering a career in the Church. Allegro quipped, ‘I shouldn’t worry about that theological job, if I were you: by the time I’ve finished there won’t be any Church left for you to join.’¹¹

Allegro’s first and second broadcasts attracted little attention in Britain, but the second was written up by the New York Times, which misunderstood and misquoted him, yet generated a flurry of debate. The third talk, broadcast on 30 January, was followed on 5 February by an article in the New York Times which could not but cause a sensation. ‘Christian bases seen in scrolls’, the headline proclaimed:

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. This is the interpretation placed on the ‘fabulous’ collection of Dead Sea Scrolls by one of an international team of seven scholars… John Allegro… said last night in a broadcast that the historical basis of the Lord’s Supper and part at least of the Lord’s prayer and the New Testament teaching of Jesus were attributable to the Qumranians.¹²

The same article hinted at trouble to come, quoting a Catholic scholar as saying that ‘any stick now seems big enough to use against Christianity’ provided it could be used ‘to dislodge belief in the uniqueness of Jesus’.¹³ Allegro, in fact, was beginning to trespass on very sensitive territory indeed. On 6 February, Time Magazine ran an article entitled ‘Crucifixion Before Christ’. Two days later, The Times reported that three American religious leaders, one Jewish, one Catholic and one Protestant, had joined forces to refute Allegro and warn against any attempt to depict ‘the Essenes’ as precursors of Christianity.¹⁴ All this controversy was, of course, finding its way back to de Vaux, together with requests that something be done. Allegro, however, appears to have been almost naively insouciant. On 9 February, he wrote to de Vaux claiming he was ‘being accused of saying the most astonishing things, some of which are true, and are indeed astounding, others come from the bosoms of eager reporters’.¹⁵

It is clear in retrospect that Allegro never fully realised how sacrosanct the idea of Jesus’ ‘uniqueness’ was, and that, as a result, he underestimated the lengths to which de Vaux and other members of the international team would go in order to distance themselves from his blunt approach. This was his only real mistake, so far — that of expecting his colleagues to accept his assertions without letting their own religious allegiances influence their judgment. In his own view, he was addressing his material as a disinterested scholar, and hoped they might eventually do likewise. His innocent gibe that, by the time he’d finished, there’d be no Church left for Strugnell to join, testifies to his conviction of how important and conclusive he felt his material to be — and to his excitement at the discovery.

On 11 February, de Vaux wrote back to Allegro, distinctly unamused. All the texts available to Allegro, de Vaux said, were also available to the other members of the team in Jerusalem. They had failed to find anything that supported Allegro’s interpretation.

In his reply, on 20 February, Allegro attempted to stand his ground and at the same time repair the rift with his colleagues and defuse the public controversy: ‘You will excuse me if I think that everyone in the world is going stark, raving mad. I am enclosing my broadcast talks, as you request, and if, after reading them, you are left wondering what all the fuss is about, you will be in precisely my position.’¹⁶ Noting that Strugnell and Milik were alleged to be preparing rebuttals of his statements, he commented, ‘I am not waging any war against the Church, and if I were, you may rest assured I would not let any loopholes in… I stand by everything I said in my three talks but I am quite prepared to believe that there may be other interpretations of my readings.’¹⁷

On 4 March, de Vaux replied, warning Allegro that a rebuttal was indeed being prepared. It would not be just from Strugnell and Milik, however. Neither would it be confined to a scholarly journal. On the contrary, it would take the form of a letter to The Times in London and would be signed by all the members of the international team.

Instead of being intimidated, Allegro was defiant. Not mincing words, he responded that a letter to The Times ‘should be most interesting to the London public, who have never heard my broadcasts’:

I have already pointed out to you that these broadcasts were made on the local Northern station… You and your friends are now apparently going to draw the attention of the gutter press of this country to these passages, of which neither they nor the majority of their readers have heard, and start a witch hunt… I congratulate you. What will certainly happen is that the press, scenting trouble, will descend like hawks on me and want to know what it is all about… they will have added fuel in what appears on the face of it to be a controversy developing between the ecclesiastics of the Scroll team and the one unattached member.¹⁸

He went on to invoke Edmund Wilson, indicating just how worried de Vaux’s team should be by the suspicions Wilson had voiced. In effect, he was attempting to use Wilson as a deterrent:

Having regard to what Wilson has already said about the unwillingness of the Church to tackle these texts objectively, you can imagine what will be made out of this rumpus.

With all respect I must point out to you that this nonsense of Wilson’s has been taken seriously here. At every lecture on the Scrolls I give, the same old question pops up: is it true that the Church is scared… and can we be sure that everything will be published. That may sound silly to you and me, but it is a serious doubt in the minds of ordinary folk… I need hardly add what effect the signatures of three Roman priests on the bottom of this proposed letter will have.¹⁹

It seems clear that, by this time, Allegro was becoming nervous. On 6 March, he wrote to another member of the international team, Frank Cross, who had just been offered an appointment at Harvard University: ‘I am awfully pleased about Harvard. Not only because this Christianity business is played out. ‘²⁰ But in the same letter, he admitted that the barrage of criticism was wearing him down and that he was feeling, both physically and mentally, ‘at the end of my tether’. Certainly he had no desire to see the publication of a letter which alienated him publicly from the other members of the team and, by so doing, impugned his credibility.

By now, of course, it was too late. On 16 March 1956, the letter duly appeared in The Times, signed by Strugnell as well as by Fathers de Vaux, Milik, Skehan and Starcky, most of the team’s ‘big guns’:

There are no unpublished texts at the disposal of Mr Allegro other than those of which the originals are at present in the Palestine Archaeological Museum where we are working. Upon the appearance in the press of citations from Mr Allegro’s broadcasts 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. Therefore there is no ‘well-defined Essenic pattern into which Jesus of Nazareth fits’, as Mr Allegro is alleged in one report to have said. It is our conviction that either he has misread the texts or he has built up a chain of conjectures which the materials do not support.²¹

To publish this sort of accusation — especially in a letter to The Times — is remarkable behaviour. It patently reflects a conclave of academics ‘ganging up’ on one of their own members. Forced on to the defensive, Allegro replied with a letter to The Times of his own, which explained and justified his position:

In the phraseology of the New Testament in this connection we find many points of resemblance to Qumran literature, since the sect also were looking for the coming of a Davidic Messiah who would arise with the priest in