The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East is a 1970 book about the linguistics of early Christianity and fertility cults in the Ancient Near East. It was written by John Marco Allegro (1923–1988). [1] [2] Theories [ edit ] Philip R. Davies, "John Allegro and the Copper Scroll" in George J. Brooke; Philip R. Davies, eds. (2002). Copper Scroll Studies. Sheffield Academic Press. p.33. ISBN 0826460550. Sounds like ‘someone’ who shall remain nameless, hasn’t read much of their Allegro – as a qualification to enact themselves as if some sort of ‘know-what’ expert, by all the customary and familiar rhetorical ‘ways and means’ of Fight-or-Flight reaction.

What I could appreciate, however, was Allegro's defense of the notion that much of what appears to be obscure and outrageous ancient religious literature is, in fact, experientially based and relevant to the concerns of real life. In other words, the use of psychotropic plants could certainly result in strong beliefs about other worlds or dimensions, even of other sentiences, and fertility is certainly of major concern to all agricultural communities. 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. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2023-04-15 20:12:47 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Boxid IA40409506 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Col_number COL-1272 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Allegro was indeed an agnostic scholar of philology who worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was not, however, the unique and trailblazing rebel Rogan presents him to be. Rather, it would be more accurate to say Allegro was fairly standard as far as eccentric, unbelieving, Bible, or Bible-adjacent scholars go, meaning he a priori ruled out divine inspiration as an explanation for the foundations of Christianity and, in an effort to make a name for himself, offered a more “rational” explanation for the story of Jesus Christ by inventing an explanation that is approximately eleventy billion times more improbable than “this stuff is in the Bible because it actually happened.” His unconventional claims have been subject to ridicule and scorn. As Time magazine put it in an article headed "Jesus as mushroom": [3]Robert E. Van Voorst Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence Eerdmans Publishing, 2000. ISBN 0-8028-4368-9 p. 77 Why else would his "theory" end up facing oblivion – or worse? Now championed and chummed over by uneducated attention-seekers of the fringe …. vainglory-seekers after panhandled pennies.

Jesus Christ was a mushroom, according to a well-respected British academic who turned his career upside down after a mind-boggling career change. That “Allegro never said anything about Christians being hippies or being dirty. He said nothing at all on the topic” isn’t quite accurate; nor even true. But it’s only wrong by a long shot. You’re off by only about, oh – a mere 180 degrees or so. No more. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East by John Allegro (1971-05-03) It’s been 30 years since Trainspotting and Irvine Welsh is the subject of a new documentary, 'Choose Irvine Welsh'. Should you?The book relates the development of language to the development of myths, religions, and cultic practices in world cultures. Allegro argues, through etymology, that the roots of Christianity, and many other religions, lay in fertility cults, and that cult practices, such as ingesting visionary plants to perceive the mind of God, persisted into the early Christian era, and to some unspecified extent into the 13th century with reoccurrences in the 18th century and mid-20th century, as he interprets the fresco of the Plaincourault Chapel to be an accurate depiction of eucharistic ritual ingestion of Amanita muscaria. Allegro argued that Jesus never existed as a historical figure but was rather a mythological creation of early Christians under the influence of psychoactive mushroom extracts such as psilocybin. [1]