Incidentally, Allegro was actually a recognised academic expert in the field (he worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls and held a relevant academic post at an internationally-recognized University).
So much expenditure of energy on this thread on people who are neither experts nor at Universities.
Perhaps though such people need to be dealt with and there does seem to be the stirring of an academic response. Perhaps Ehrman deserves praise for getting the ball rolling? If those so ignorant of history and historical reasoning as Dawkins and Myers (however much admired by some of the internet classes) try to support the Jesus-mythicists, then they need rebutting.
I have written something on Allegro's past which I will cut and paste below:
Allegro began as an academic but went off the deep end. He did some work on the Dead Sea Scrolls but his views grew more eccentric as the years progressed. Beginning in the late 1950's, he alluded to the figure of the Teacher of Righteousness having parallels to Christ but the textual examples he cited were nonexistent or misrepresented
1 and his claims denied in a letter to the London Times by others working on the scrolls.
2 Allegro later announced in an article for Harper's that the names of Jesus and Peter meant, respectively, “Essene” and the title of an Essene official.
3 Thus far he is the only scholar to come to such a conclusion.
In 1968, he published his final work on the Copper Scroll but it was so error ridden that John Strugnell had to write a 114-page article providing the necessary corrections.
4 With his academic reputation slipping quickly, Allegro came to believe there was a conspiracy against him. However, these difficulties were minor compared to the furor that followed in 1970.
It was then that Allegro went from sloppy and sensationalistic to completely off the wall with
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Near East. In this book, Allegro announced Jesus never existed but was invented under the influence of psychotropic mushrooms. He also apparently discovered in the few short years since the Harper's article that the name of Jesus now meant “semen that saves” and that of Peter meant “mushroom.”
5 Most scholars who read the book thought it far more likely Allegro was under the influence of “sacred mushrooms” than were the early Christians.
Linking Christianity to sex and drugs was bound to get attention and Allegro's sensationalistic effort quickly earned him publicity. However, his book was quickly savaged and prompted a public rebuke by fifteen leading scholars
6 that included experts in Semitic languages, Old Testament studies, Church history, Oriental laws, Assyriology, comparative religion, Islamic studies, and Ethiopian Studies. This diverse group from different religious perspectives were united in their condemnation of Allegro's book as “not based on any philological or other evidence which they can regard as scholarly” and concluded by stating “the work is an essay in fantasy rather than philology.”
7Rarely had an academic been so publicly taken to the woodshed by his peers. Allegro's sensationalism and increasingly shoddy work ended in the quick demise of his academic career. His publisher apologized for ever releasing the book and Allegro soon resigned from his university post.
8 He spent the remaining years of his life writing on an alleged conspiracy to suppress the Dead Sea Scrolls and his mushroom cult hypothesis. He was never again taken seriously on a scholarly level.
1. Jenkins (2002), 180.
2. VanderKam and Flint (2005), 324.
3. Yamauchi, “Jesus Outside the New Testament: What is the Evidence?” in ed. Moreland and Wilkins (1996).
4. VanderKam and Flint (2005), 323.
5. VanderKam and Flint (2005), 324.
6. The comments were endorsed by G. M. Driver , P. R. Ackroyd, G. W. Anderson, J. N. D. Anderson, James Barr, C. F. Beckingham, Henry Chadwick, John Emerton, O. R. Gurney, E. G. Parrinder, J. B. Segal, D. Winston Thomas, Edward Ullendorff, G. Vermes, and D. J. Wiseman.
7. Blaiklock (1984), 8fn.
8. VanderKam and Flint (2005), 324.
Bibliography
Blaiklock, E. M.
Jesus Christ: Man or Myth? (Thomas Nelson, 1984).
Jenkins, Philip
Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (Oxford University Press, 2001).
VanderKam, James & Flint, Peter
The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005).
Wilkins, Michael J. and J. P. Moreland, eds.
Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus (Zondervan, 1996).