Judith Anne Brown

This attempted hagiography of Allegro winds up backfiring badly, depicting a miserable, nasty man who became utterly unhinged by his hatred of religion. If you want a concise summary of just how bonkers Allegro was, consider that his big theory asserted (based on bad philology and worse anthropology) that Jesus wasn't a real person but was invented as kind of a personification of a psychedelic mushroom by a drug-fueled sex cult. Allegro's main achievement with the Dead Sea Scrolls team was supervising the opening of the Copper Scroll and his work on pesher fragments (although his Cave 4 work was so shoddy it required an article almost as long as the book to correct all the errors), but the rest of his life reads like a particularly sordid chapter from a Dan Brown novel. The book itself is indifferently written and the author (Allegro's daughter) appears to hate religion as much as her father did. How this trash found its way into the Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls & Related Literature series is a mystery as baffling as one of Allegro's bizarre theories. I mostly read it to see if it gave any real insight into the rapid collapse of a scholar who once showed potential. It did that in spades, revealing, I think, far more than the author intended. I walked away from it feeling kind of gross.… (mais)

Engaging intellectual biography of a controversial, and underrated figure. Of relevance to everyone with an interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and to anyone who values the account of a person committed to intellectual honesty no matter the personal cost.

Written by Allegro's daughter, the first two-thirds are especially exciting because of the way she entwines his personal efforts with the development of his theoretical ideas. Her own writing style is surprising gripping and delightful. The last portion of the book loses some of this energy, though, when it transitions into a synoptic overview of the themes of his later books, and we lose sight of what he was doing on a more personal level (e.g., his wife, a significant figure in the most formative years of his career, disappears altogether after he separates from the family).… (mais)