Since the 1960s, one scholar has dedicated his career to arguing that Jesus was not a living man, but in fact a mushroom. John Marco Allegro was one of the first scholars permitted to decipher the ancient documents now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, that were discovered in 1947 in the Judean Desert. They contained the oldest surviving versions of books that would later be incorporated into the biblical canon. Allegro and his colleagues were the first to go about making sense of the documents, as they were obviously discovered untranslated, eventually publishing the texts after hard work and disagreements. Allegro then went on to write two more books on the subject in 1958, The Dead Sea Scrolls and The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which remain extremely influential. Then in 1970 and again in 1979, Allegro published two more books. These expanded on his idea that Christianity was a cover for a secret cryptic sex cult generated by people under the influence of Amanita muscaria, more commonly known as Fly agaric. And that Jesus was a metaphor for the fungus and its influences. Using etymology, Allegro argued that early Christianity was created by an Essene cult that recorded their practices through the texts of the New Testament. And that evangelists misunderstood the text's true meaning when they transcribed it. There was never a man called Jesus, only a cult that used mushrooms to have hallucinations. He also argued that the God of the Old Testament was "a mighty penis in the heavens who in a thunderous climax of the storm ejaculated semen upon the furrows of Mother Earth." Allegro's views were not well received, with some believing he created the argument as revenge against Christian critics who dismissed his earlier translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, whilst some believed he just ran away with the wrong idea. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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