Controversial British member
of the international team of 9 scholars assembled to study the Dead Sea
scrolls in 1953. A bright linguist with several publications, he was
nominated by the eminent Oxford Semitic scholar, Godfrey R. Driver, to
aid in reconstruction & publication of the mss. found at Qumran. A
fast worker with a flair for publicity, he became one of the first
scholars to bring the scrolls to public attention & was the
first member of the team to complete the editing & publication of the
materials that had been assigned to him.
But Allegro's speculative public
announcements, criticism of the slow pace of publication by others &
rejection of the thesis of the scrolls' origins championed by team
leader Roland de Vaux led to ostracism & public criticism of his
theses by his more conservative colleagues. His unauthorized 1960
publication of the Copper Scroll was criticized as dishonest shoddy
scholarship by Fr. de Vaux, despite the fact that Allegro had played a
pivotal role in enlisting experts
to open the rigid scroll & in personally transcribing its difficult text.
Allegro, a Protestant-turned-agnostic,
responded by claiming that the other team members, who were all Roman
Catholics, were deliberately delaying publication of the scrolls because
they contained material that contradicted Christian tradition. This drew a
sharp rebuke from leading British scholars, including his own mentor G. R.
Driver. With his growing public reputation as a maverick & his
academic career in shambles, Allegro turned to using his linguistic skills
to write sensational speculative books for commercial publishers that
Although today Allegro is best known for
his scandalous challenges to traditional beliefs, his ultimate legacy may yet rest on his
contribution to research on the Dead Sea Scrolls. For his protest against
the secrecy of the scrolls team was gradually picked up by other scholars
& eventually led to the release of films of the scrolls for all
scholars to study. And the recent posthumous publication of the 1500
photographs of scroll fragments that Allegro took from 1955-1962 will probably
make his work, if not his theories, one of the most important resources for scholarly study of the
scrolls for generations to come.
For more details of the
rift between Allegro & other scroll scholars see:
Dead
Sea Scrolls: Timetable of Discovery & Debate (1955-1979)
Major Publications:
For a
recent biography see:
Other
resources on line: