ALLEGRO RELOADED: From the Bible and Interpretation website:

JOHN ALLEGRO AND
THE CHRISTIAN MYTH

John Allegro observed the way the Jesus story echoed events and ideas in Gnostic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Old Testament, and he identified the doctrine of divine light as the unifying theme. This is expressed in myth and imagery and is a key to understanding a range of mythologies - including Christianity.

By Judith Anne Brown
May 2005

I haven't read Allegro's books, so I won't say too much here, although I will say a few things. If this essay is a fair summary of his theories, I am not persuaded. Judith Anne Brown is Allegro's daughter, which I really think ought to have been mentioned with her essay.

First, regarding the Teacher of Righteousness: he is mentioned in the Damascus Document and some of the Pesharim, nowhere else. Some speculate that he may have written some or all of the Hodayot, but this is speculation. One cannot assume that the Hodayot reflect his teachings. Likewise, the Community Rule never mentions the Teacher of Righteousness. On what grounds, then, is it quoted as part of his message?

Second, much is made of the light-darkness dualism in Qumran sectarianism, the New Testament, and Christian Gnosticism. If this is an attempt to argue for a genetic link between Qumran sectarianism and Christian Gnosticism (and I don't see how else to read it) I'm skeptical. Light=good, dark=bad is a fundamental human archetype based on our sensory apparatus. When it's light we can see and it's safer. When it's dark, we can't, and the monsters come out. The Qumran sectarian light-darkness predestination, in which people are born with their destined proportion of light/darkness which determines their eternal fate, is quite difference from the Gnostic aspiration to fan the soul's spark of light to redeem it from the dark material realm and restore it to the Pleroma of light. The New Testament light-darkness imagery is just that, imagery, and does not reflect a coherent doctrine.

I think it is very unlikely that there is direct influence from the Qumran sectarians on either the New Testament or Gnostic Christianity. They are all drawing on apocalyptic Jewish themes and they all make use to some degree of the light-darkness archetype, but the parallels don't go very far. First-century Christianity extracted the messiah/eschatological divine mediator theme from Judaism and makes it central in a way that it wasn't for the Qumran sectarians. The Gnostics developed this redeemer idea out of first-century Christianity and introduce a lot of Platonic myth into the system.

Third, regarding the proposed influence of the story of the Teacher of Righteousness on the story of Jesus, I'm skeptical again. The reference seems to be to CD B xx 14-15 (not ii 14), which is a typically vague eschatological prophecy and which mentions a "unique teacher" (or perhaps, with a plausible emendation, "the teacher of the Yahad") but not the Teacher of Righteousness specifically. The Qumran manuscripts of the Damascus Document were all written before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., so this passage could not refer to this event, and we certainly have no evidence that the early Christians knew it or knew anything about the Teacher of Righteousness. Where are the specific references to hanging or trees with reference to the Teacher of Righteousness? I can't find any. Some years ago in my Divine Mediator Figures course we looked at parallels between Jesus and the Teacher of Righteousness as mediator figures. You can find some notes here and here (scroll down). There are some mildly interesting phenomenological parallels, but it would be hard to make a case for any influence.

Perhaps the arguments are stronger in Brown's new book on her father, but I'm not optimistic. A book on Allegro as an important figure in the history of Qumran scholarship is welcome and should be very interesting, and it seems reasonable for his daughter to write it. But his theories did not convince his contemporaries and now, many years later when we know so much more about the Qumran library, I doubt very much that any attempt to bring them back into the mainstream of Qumran scholarship will have much success.