the constant skeptic

This man, John Marco Allegro, ruined his career by publishing his views on what the Dead Sea Scrolls meant.

“Thousands of years before Christianity, secret cults arose which worshiped the sacred mushroom—the Amanita Muscaria—which, for various reasons (including its shape and power as a drug) came to be regarded as a symbol of God on earth.

“This is the basic origin of the stories in the New Testament. They are a literary device to spread the rites and rules of mushroom worship to the faithful.”

taken directly from johnallegro.org:

John Allegro understood from the start that the job of the editing team was to make the Dead Sea scroll texts available to scholars everywhere, and he believed their message mattered to everyone.

The scrolls had been written around or shortly before the time of Jesus. They give insight into the religious life and thought of a Jewish sect based at Qumran by the Dead Sea and usually identified as Essenes. Allegro believed the scrolls could help us understand the common origin of three religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He hoped they might be able to bring together scholars of each tradition in studying their common heritage without the barriers of religious prejudice.

This would mean making the texts accessible to all. Allegro had published the sections of text allotted to him in academic journals as soon as he had prepared them, and his volume (number five) in the official series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan was ready for the press by the early 1960s. He continually campaigned for the publication of all scroll texts. However, his colleagues took a different approach, and little else appeared until 1991.

Allegro saw himself as a publicist for the scrolls. His books, talks and broadcasts promoted public interest in the scrolls and their significance. At first, the rest of the team encouraged his efforts, which after all were intended to help fund their research. But they thought he went too far in raising questions about the parallels between Essenism and Christianity, and doing so in public. He was accused of stirring up controversy at the expense of scholarship.

John Allegro believed the Dead Sea Scrolls raised issues that concerned everyone. It wasn’t just a matter of dusty manuscripts and disputed translations - the story of the scrolls raised questions about freedom of access to evidence, freedom of speech, and freedom to challenge orthodox religious views. He believed that through understanding the origins of religion people could be freed from its bonds to think for themselves and take responsibility for their own judgments.

Was Allegro on to something that the Church silenced? I think not. The fact remains that he ruined his career by making sensational claims about the Bible without providing supporting evidence. To make a claim that Christ is really a symbol for a fungus is quite ridiculous and without supporting evidence deserves to remain in low-brow hippie / new-ager discussion groups only.

thanks to metareligion.com for the following:
Briefly, he argued that:

[1] The people responsible for the Scrolls had considerable astronomical knowledge used to draw up personal astrological charts.

[2] The charts describe the expected physical and spiritual characteristics of people born in certain sections of the Zodiac .

[3] There are 9 spiritual parts, compiled from ‘light’ & ‘darkness’. Eg A Taurean is spiritually 3 times ‘light’, 6 parts dark’.

[4] Individual astrological charts are used by doctors/prophets to gauge medical adjustments needed to rebalance these ‘light’ and ‘dark’ traits.

[5] Like other ‘Mystery’ cults, they put participants through 7 stages of inward purification before the climax of the fungus eating ritual .