DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31520, 7 November 1967, Page 18

DEAD SEA SCROLLS

New Theory Attacked

A Manchester University lecturer’s theory, published in “The Press,” that the New Testament was just a cover story for a drug-taking cult has drawn the ire of Professor E. M. Blaiklock, professor of classics at the University of Auckland.

Mr John Marco Allegro, lecturer in Old Testament and inter-testamental studies at Manchester University, based his theory on his own study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Professor Blaiklock. however, believes that the scrolls, apart from clearing up a handful of minor textual corruptions in the Bible, have contributed little. Allusions in the scrolls to a “teacher of righteousness” done to death by the hierarchy probably referred to the founder of the sect which left the scrolls, says Professor Blaiklock in a pamphlet about the significance of the scrolls. “To identiy him with Christ, who died in the full blaze of recorded history, is only to demonstrate the eagerness of some to diminish at all costs the historicity of the founder of the Christian faith,” the professor says. “In short,” he says, “It is historically impossible to identify the well-documented life of Christ with the exotic allegorising of the desert sect.”