David York Christ and the Sacred Mushroom资料.pdfVIP

Sunday Mirror February 15, 1970 no. 357 Front page: Famous scholar challenges the faith of centuries CHRIST AND THE SACRED MUSHROOM By DAVID YORK Lecturer John Allegro examines a dried specimen of the sacred mushroom. ‘Some will accuse me of blasphemy’ A DISTINGUISHED British scholar has written a sensational book that is certain to cause the greatest upheaval in orthodox Christian thinking since Charles Darwin said Man was descended from the ape. For he not only argues the non-existence of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, but claims that Christianity itself – as well as Judaism and other religions of the near and Middle East—are no more than hangovers from an ancient fertility cult. Expert The author of this remarkable book is 47-year-old John M. Allegro, lecturer in Old Testament and Inter-Testamental Studies at Manchester University, and a philologist—a student of words and language. He is also one of the world’s greatest experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mr. Allegro told the Sunday Mirror yesterday : “Thousands of years before Christianity, secret cults arose which worshipped the sacred mushroom—the Amanita Muscaria—which, for various reasons (including its shape and power as a drug) came to be regarded as a symbol of God on earth . “When the secrets of the cult had to be written down, it was done in the form of codes hidden in folk tales. “This is the basic origin of the stories in the New Testament. They are a literary device to spread the rites and rules of mushroom worship to the faithful.” Challenge Such a claim, such a challenge, to orthodox belief, coming as it does from one of the country ’s leading experts in his field, is something of a religious H-bomb—th