Word: allegro
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...Similarities. John M. Allegro (The Dead Sea Scrolls; Pelican; 85?) is a bright young (33) British expert on Semitic languages who worked for a year on the international team of scholars that is piecing together and translating the scroll fragments in Jerusalem. Back at Manchester University (where he now occupies a teaching post in comparative Semitic philology), bearded John Allegro turned his reputation for brightness to one for brashness; he drew a public rebuke from his fellow scholars (TIME, April 2) when he suggested that the New Testament's Jesus Christ may have been modeled on the scrolls...
Though he does not see the Qumran sect as the originator of Christianity, Allegro feels that it profoundly influenced the first Christians. Withdrawn into the desert from the persecution of a corrupt priesthood in Jerusalem, holding in contempt the scribes and Pharisees (whom they called "Seekers After Smooth Things"), the Qumran community practiced baptism, chastity, community of goods. They wrote the ritual of a Messianic banquet with breaking of bread and blessing of wine, which Allegro boldly suggests may prefigure the Last Supper and Christian Communion. They expected the imminent end of the world and the coming of two Messiahs...
...Differences. Like most other scholars, Allegro identifies the Qumran sect with the Essenes, who almost surely had a monastery near the Dead Sea at the same point as the Qumran ruins. The Essenes, says Allegro, had a kind of "Third Order" of laymen living according to a modified rule in the towns and villages of Palestine, and "it seems reasonable to assume that Jesus was acquainted with such people." He adds: "It is possible that the 'great company of priests' who were 'obedient to the faith,' mentioned in Acts 6:7, included at least part...
...Allegro suggests, their religion was vastly different from Pauline Christianity, which Allegro seems to consider a Greco-Roman corruption of this early faith-and possibly a corruption of Jesus' own faith. Asks Allegro: "Did Jesus himself go all the way of the New Testament? Did [He] really believe He was God in the flesh?" The Qumran community, writes Allegro, would have abhorred the concept of a God-man (as do the Jews and Moslems today), and they would not have thought of admitting Gentiles to salvation. But the Pauline emphasis on the resurrection was "an even greater difference...
...Real Testimony. Author Caster's lucid and factual introduction to the book takes issue with the contention of Allegro and others that the so-called Teacher of Righteousness was a single historical personage, martyred by "the Wicked Priest," and whose resurrection was awaited. The title, which Gaster prefers to translate "True exponent of the Law," refers, he says, to "a continuing office rather than a particular individual, and . . . the various allusions to him are not in fact to one and the same person." He believes that various documents probably refer to different teachers at different times...