Product Description

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 Making extensive use of Allegro's letters, lecture notes, draft manuscripts, and other previously unpublished writings, Brown brings to life anew the extraordinary discoveries and debates that began in the caves by the Dead Sea over half a century ago.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1209815 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780802828491
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
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Customer Reviews

The Allegro legacy of controversy lives on!
John Marco Allegro - The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls
- By Judith Anne Brown -daughter of John Allegro.

John Marco Allegro is hereby vindicated! Scholars of the world beware!

Judith Anne Brown has inherited the same writing style, razor sharp wit, and knack for forcing people to think, as well as for stirring trouble and controversy that her father had.

Judith takes us through a riveting and fascinating glimpse at the life of John Marco Allegro. From John's youth as the son of an immigrant family, to his beginnings in the British Navy, to starting his studies as a Methodist minister. While studying for the ministry, she shows his personal, detailed letters that start him questioning the authority of Biblical teachings; to finally leaving the ministry to begin his studies at Manchester, and then Oxford, making him noticed as an up and coming biblical and language expert and Dead Sea Scrolls authority. Then finally on to his discovery that Christianity and religion is primarily based on entheogen (drug) use and star/sun worship.

Judy takes the reader through the times of laughs and the times of tears and turmoil.
She provides an outline of John's personal history, his family, his life as a playboy, the falling apart of his marriage, to the inner turmoil and outrage he had that no one would look at his views open mindedly and seriously, because they challenged the orthodox.

She provides and excellent breakdown of the content of each of his books, screen writes, and personal letters; proving John's side of the story. Judith gives the reader interesting and easy to follow story line, with a deep understanding into the most controversial of topics in recent decades.

This book contains a beautiful collection of previously unpublished photographs of John, the family, and the Middle East during his expeditions.

If this book wasn't written about John, I would have forgotten that I wasn't reading John's own work. Judy certainly has the Allegro ability to stir controversy--only this time people will have to pay attention. She has thoroughly debunked the 30 years of attacks, lies, and rumors that had spread over the years against John.

At times the book may move you to tears while reading about his personal struggles and the emotions over the blanketed attacks stirred regarding his unorthodox approach at religious scholarship and finally to his sudden death, on his birthday, on Feb. 17, 1988-and continuing legacy today.

Judith Brown has provided substantiation for Allegro's views, and debunked those empty attacks on his integrity and scholarship. Any intelligent and open-minded scholar will hereby be forced into reconsidering many of John's views...and for that matter, Judith's own views.

This book provides an absolutely solid foundation for future work to begin building on John Marco Allegro's ideas--an excellent foundation for up and coming publications by her and other scholars and authors.

The Allegro legacy of controversy lives on!

A better than 5 star rating.

john marco allegro by judith brown
Obviously, a favorable review of her father who was much maligned for presenting a novel
explaination for the origins of myth and religion, specifically the Christian
faith. He has never been seriously challanged by authentic philologists,
only by religious zealots and others who are convinced the Earth is flat.
Her portrait of a driven, ambitious and wounded man is full and warm and shows
much love of the man and his ideas, who opened the world to the hidden
exegeses by biblical scholars too frigtened to make known to a deluded public
what the Chuches and their minions were doing to them and the 'civilized'
world.

Allegro's Daughter Puts Forth a Clear History of His Work
Judith Anne Brown's John Marco Allegro: The Maverick Of The Dead Sea Scrolls is an essential addendum to her father's important work. John Allegro was severely maligned after his publication of The Sacred Mushroom and the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1970. An unfounded response to his book from the religious and academic community at the time prejudged and condemned him unfairly. His work translating the scrolls found at Qumran, where the ancient Hebrew Bible literature was discovered by local sheep herders in the late 1940s, was the most scientific method undertaken by the international team. His non secular education, including extensive study at Oxford prior to going to Israel, provided an objective approach comparing the literature in the scrolls with derivations of words as they had evolved in the region. As Ms. Brown points out, John Allegro placed an asterisk next to each Sumerian word root theory not found in earlier extant literature. He was clear headed about his etymological projections, he was not propagating the intrigue of psychotropic fungus culture. Because of the latent fear of the subject ingrained in the myco-phobic consciousness learned by the present Angelo-European and other peoples, the readers of the world have been set astray of Allegro's work in etymology. Her book has somewhat redeemed his academic integrity, though too late and too unnoticed to have not lost his scientific work into the annals of ignorance.