The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception

…a dangerous situation is fast developing where the original idea of an international and interdenominational editing group is being bypassed. All fragments are brought first to De V. or Milik, and, as with cave Eleven, complete secrecy is kept over what they are till long after they have been studied by this group.⁴²

This report is extremely disquieting. Scholars outside the international team have suspected that some form of monitoring and selection was taking place. Here, Allegro confirms these suspicions. One can only wonder what might have happened to any fragment that held doctrines opposed to that of the Church.

Allegro then outlined his own plan, part of which involved ‘inviting scholars who can spare six months or a year at least to come to Jerusalem and take their place in the team’:

I believe that a rule should be laid down that preliminary publications must be made immediately the document is collected as far as it seems possible, and that a steady stream of these publications should be made in one journal… This business of holding up publication of fragments merely to avoid the ‘deflowering’ of the final volume seems to me most unscholarly, as is the business of keeping competent scholars away from the fragments… There was perhaps good reason… when we were in the first stages of collecting the pieces. But now that most of this work is done, anybody can work over a document and publish it in at least provisional form.⁴³

One may not immediately sympathise with Allegro as his personality manifests itself through his letters — cavalier, impudent, cheerfully iconoclastic. But it is impossible not to sympathise with the academic integrity of his position. He may indeed have been egocentric in his conviction that his particular interpretation of the Qumran material was valid and important. But the statements quoted above constitute an appeal on behalf of scholarship itself — an appeal for openness, honesty, accessibility, impartiality. Unlike de Vaux and the international team, Allegro displays no propensity for either secrecy or self-aggrandisement. If he is conspiring, he is conspiring only to make the Dead Sea Scrolls available to the world at large, and quickly enough not to betray the trust reposed in academic research. Such an aspiration can only be regarded as honourable and generous.

Allegro’s honour and generosity, however, were not to be rewarded, or even recognized. The film, completed by the end of 1957, was not transmitted by the BBC until the summer of 1959, and then only in a late-night slot which attracted a minimal audience. By that time, understandably enough, Allegro was beginning to grow uneasy. On 10 January 1959, after the latest in a long series of postponements, he wrote to Awni Dajani:

Well, they’ve done it again. For the fifth time the BBC have put off showing that TV programme on the Scrolls… There can be no reasonable doubt now that De Vaux’s cronies in London are using their influence to kill the programme, as he wished… De Vaux will stop at nothing to control the Scrolls material. Somehow or other he must be removed from his present controlling position. I am convinced that if something does turn up which affects the Roman Catholic dogma, the world will never see it. De Vaux will scrape the money out of some or other barrel and send the lot to the Vatican to be hidden or destroyed…⁴⁴

After repeating what he’d come increasingly to see as a viable short-term solution — nationalisation of the Rockefeller Museum, the ‘Scrollery’ and the scrolls by the Jordanian government — he reveals the sense of punctilio to which he’d previously felt subject: ‘I might even let out an instance or two when information has been suppressed — but I’ll only do that if De Vaux looks like winning.’⁴⁵

In 1961, King Hussein appointed Allegro honorary adviser on the scrolls to the government of Jordan. The post, however, though prestigious enough, entailed no real authority. It was not until November 1966, five years later, that the Jordanian government finally acted on Allegro’s suggestion and nationalised the Rockefeller Museum. By then, as we have seen, it was too late. Within the year, the Six Day War was to erupt, and the museum, the ‘Scrollery’ and its contents all passed into Israeli hands; and Israel, as we have noted, was too much in need of international support to risk a head-on confrontation with the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy. Only four years before, Pope John XXIII had officially and doctrinally exculpated the Jews of any responsibility for Jesus’ death, and excised all vestiges of anti-Semitism from Roman Catholic Canon Law. No one wished to see this sort of conciliatory work undone.

By that time, too, Allegro was understandably weary and disillusioned with the world of professional scholarship. For some time, he had been anxious to leave academia and sustain himself solely as a writer. He was also eager to return to his original chosen field, philology, and had spent some five years working on a book which derived from what he regarded as a major philological breakthrough. The result of his efforts appeared in 1970 as The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross — the work for which Allegro today is most famous, and for which he is almost universally dismissed.

The argument in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross rests on complicated philological premises which we, like many other commentators, find difficult to accept. That, however, is incidental. Scholars tend all the time to expound their theories based on premises of varying validity, and they are usually, at worst, ignored, not publicly disgraced. What turned The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross into a scandal were Allegro’s conclusions about Jesus. In attempting to establish the source of all religious belief and practice, Allegro asserted that Jesus had never existed in historical reality, was merely an image evoked in the psyche under the influence of an hallucinatory drug, psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. In effect, he argued, Christianity, like all other religions, stemmed from a species of psychedelic experience, a ritualistic rite de passage promulgated by an orgiastic magic mushroom cult.

Taken separately, and placed in a different context, Allegro’s conclusions would probably not have provoked the storm they did. Certainly reputable scholars before Allegro had questioned, and doubted, the existence of an historical Jesus. Some of them, for that matter, still do, though they are in a minority. And there is little dispute today that drugs — psychedelic and of other kinds — were used to at least some extent among the religions, cults, sects and mystery schools of the ancient Middle East — as indeed they were, and continue to be, across the world. It is certainly not inconceivable that such substances were known to, and perhaps employed by, 1st-century Judaism and early Christianity. One must also remember the climate and atmosphere of the late 1960s. Today, in retrospect, one tends to think in terms of the so-called ‘drug culture’ — in terms of a facile ersatz mysticism, of Ken Kesey and his ‘Merry Pranksters’, of Tom Wolfe and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, of hippies thronging the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, staging ‘love-ins’ and ‘be-ins’ in Golden Gate Park. That, however, is only one side of the picture, and tends to eclipse the very real excitement and expectation that psychedelia generated even in more sophisticated and disciplined minds — the conviction, shared by many scientists, neurologists, biochemists, academicians, psychologists, medical practitioners, philosophers and artists, that humanity was indeed on the verge of some genuine epistemological ‘breakthrough’.

Books such as Huxley’s The Doors of Perception enjoyed enormous currency, and not just among the rebellious young. At Harvard, Timothy Leary, with his proclamations of a ‘new religion’, still possessed in those days a considerable measure of credibility. In The Teachings of Don Juan, Castaneda had produced not just a best-selling book, but also an acclaimed academic dissertation for the University of California. Psychedelic substances were routinely used in both medicine and psychotherapy. Divinity students in Boston conducted a service under the influence of LSD, and most of them said afterwards they had indeed experienced an intensified sense of the sacred, a greater rapprochement to the divine. Even the MP Christopher Mayhew, later Minister of Defence, voluntarily appeared stoned on the nation’s television screens, beaming beatifically at his interviewer, wearing the seraphically celestial smirk of a man newly promoted to sagehood. One can see why the academic and critical establishment recoiled in alarm from Allegro’s book, even though Allegro himself repudiated the mentality of Haight-Asbury and never himself smoked or drank.

All the same, and even if not for the reasons usually cited, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross was a distinctly unorthodox book, and effectively compromised Allegro’s credibility as a scholar. Its reviewer in The Times, for example, became personal, embarking on an amateur psychoanalysis of Allegro in order to debunk him.⁴⁶ Allegro’s own publishers publicly apologised for issuing the book, cravenly admitting it to be ‘unnecessarily offensive’.⁴⁷ In a letter to