The End of a Road

by John Marco Allegro

The End of a Road came out in the slipstream of The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross. Allegro saw it as a companion volume. Since The Sacred Mushroom had demolished the church’s pretensions to moral authority, he asked: Why should 20th-century people owe any allegiance to a fertility myth? What gave a fictional 1st-century rabbi the right to tell people how to run their lives, then or now–apart from a set of generalized “thou shalt nots” wrested from context & impracticably vague by comparison with real contemporary law codes? It was time for people to stand on their own feet, to close the gate at the end of the church’s road, & step out on the road of compassion, responsibility & common sense.
"This book isn't a postmortem examination of a moribund Church. In it I am not primarily concerned with the cult of the sacred fungus, which fully deserved all the abusive epithets heaped upon its perversions by the Romans when they tried to suppress the ‘Christians’. It deals with the end of one road, & more particularly the opening up of a new, wider highway for all men to travel. We shall look to some of the problems now facing mankind and bearing down on us with the dramatic advances in modern technology in a shrinking world, & see how old & inadequate moral sanctions can be revised or replaced by new ones. We shall discuss how the present catastrophe of a discredited Xianity can be turned to good account thru seizing the opportunity for fresh, creative thinking in a society free from the inhibitions of religious dogma. Let the dead bury their dead." (End, p.18)
The End of a Road was published by:
Macgibbon & Kee/London, '70 hardback 1st ed
Dial Press/NY, '70 hardback 1st US ed ISBN1135620660
Dial Press/NY, '71 paper
Panther/London '72 paper

Hardcover

First published October 5, 1970

About the author

John Marco Allegro was a scholar who challenged orthodox views of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bible and the history of religion, with books that attracted popular attention and scholarly derision.

After service in the Royal Navy during World War II, Allegro started to train for the Methodist ministry but transferred to a degree in Oriental Studies at the University of Manchester. In 1953 he was invited to become the first British representative on the international team working on the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls in Jordan. The following year he was appointed assistant lecturer in Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester, and held a succession of lectureships there until he resigned in 1970 to become a full-time writer. In 1961 he was made Honorary Adviser on the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Jordanian government.

Allegro's thirteen books include The Dead Sea Scrolls (1956), The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (1960), The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979) as well as Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan vol. V (1968) and articles in academic journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, Palestine Exploration Quarterly and Journal of Semitic Studies, and in the popular press.

Reviews

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thinking for oneself:

When would think of a pandemic?

😷

At least we are now able to stave off death from old people to the extent that the overcrowding of geriatric wards with the senile age is fast becoming a major social problem. Glib axioms like ‘reverence for life’ are coming to have less and less relevance, and the church insistence on the ultimate value of human life once a major factor in humanitarianism is a fast becoming a positive menace to the balance of population in a number of countries.


Think of india 🇮🇳 or china 🇨🇳 with populations of a billion🥲.

Where fertility is encouraged and Catholicism says no to birth control. The problems that arise from such issues is. Poverty stricken, less educated, extramarital children out of wedlock and the list goes on in problems that keep hurtles in society as a community

No people can have a choice if a male or female is born with hormones at certain times of conception.

Or for people wanting assistance in medical suicide to prevent older senile problems or disease or evading
Death 💀 looming.

The books puts in proprietary terms that people are over population and growth busters are called less likely to work with science or medical means that could move in and replace the church ⛪️ to give people a better life with out having a worry on 70% of the population during in war. When resources end or famine hits. Or public unrest for these reasons in poverty.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was brought up virtually without religion, so this book had much less impact on me than it might for a Christian like Allegro or many of his readers. Rather than approach religion as something a priori vital, I have always approached it in all its aspects as something occult and mysterious which I aimed to understand. If one accepts Allegro's claim that the Christian canon is a much-redacted textual tradition that has as its historical core a secret fertility cult, that's no problem. Indeed, it's quite understandable, albeit complex in its permutations of revelation and concealment. Such notwithstanding, the subsequent appropriations of the tradition by those not in on the gnostic secret is also meaningfully explorable. The stumbling-block for those in the Christian position is only the loss of the historical claims, the "proof" of everything by the real death and real resurrection of Jesus. Never being able to take such claims seriously, not in the context of what we ordinarily refer to as "reality", this is no obstacle to my being able to appreciate the many varieties of the Christian mythos.