Allegro Under Fire

Biblical scholars around the world arched their eyebrows at three BBC broadcasts of British Professor John Marc Allegro of Manchester University last January (TIME, Feb. 6). Philologist Allegro, who had worked on the team deciphering the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem, drew an imposing number of dramatic parallels between Jesus Christ and the Teacher of Righteousness mentioned in the scrolls of the Qumran community, which were found almost nine years ago near the Dead Sea.

Last week Allegro had to admit that his fascinating story was based not on facts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but "largely on inference. All reconstructions of historical events," said he, "are inference."

In his broadcasts, Allegro had been far more assured. He spoke then of the pre-Christian Teacher's "probable" crucifixion at the hands of the "wicked priest," of his followers' hope for his return to lead the "people of the New Testament," as the Qumran community called themselves, to "a new and purified Jerusalem." The parallels seemed so pat and Allegro so sure of himself that experts assumed that he had had access to a bombshell of a discovery.

Chain of Conjectures. A bombshell did indeed burst, but it was of quite a different kind. In a letter to the London Times, five scholars* currently working on the scrolls declared:

"In view of the broad repercussions of [Allegro's] statements, and the fact that the materials on which they are based are not yet available to the public, we, his colleagues, feel obliged to make the following statement:

"There are no unpublished texts at the disposal of Mr.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 Allegro's broadcasts we have reviewed all the pertinent materials, published and unpublished. We are unable to see in the text 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 Judgement Day ... 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."

In his reply last week, Allegro did not take back his statements about the Jesus-like teacher, but he did take much of the starch of certainty out of them. "We do have certain vague reference in Biblical commentaries from the sect's library which have to be interpreted as best we can," he said. "We know, for instance, that the teacher was persecuted by a certain 'wicked priest,' in the 'house of his exile,' presumed to be Qumran. It was long ago suggested that this persecutor could be identified with Alexander Jannaeus, the Jewish priest-king of the second and first centuries B.C., and this view has steadily gained ground among scholars. From Josephus we learn that Jannaeus practised the cruel punishment of crucifixion, and, indeed, on one occasion had 800 Pharisaic rebels executed in this way in Jerusalem following an unsuccessful revolt. From this alone it would have been a not unreasonable inference that the teacher suffered the same fate, since he, too, had rebelled against the Jerusalem priesthood . . . It is true that unpublished material in my care made me more willing to accept certain suggestions made previously by other scholars on what have appeared to me to be insufficient grounds . . . As to the question of whether I have misread my texts or not, the question can best be decided by the consensus of scholarly opinion when these texts have been published."

Teacher Spanks. Fellow scholars who had heard Allegro on the BBC and in private breeze-shooting seemed to agree that he had treated his material more like a Sunday supplement writer than a philologist. Harold H. Rowley, senior professor 'in Manchester's Semitics department and Allegro's onetime teacher, spanked him soundly.

"I deplore as unscholarly the presentation to the world of what scholars everywhere have supposed--as I supposed--to be specific statements in an unpublished text to which Mr. Allegro alone had access, when they are only his deductions from evidence which is capable of other interpretations . . . Mr. Allegro was one of the most promising students I have ever had, and he is capable of doing fine work. I think it is a pity that he was entrusted with the editing of texts far from supervision . . . Important documents, for which scholars in all countries are eagerly waiting, should not be used to give immature scholars a spurious authority."

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