The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls Quotes

“And what of Allegro? Shunned by the scholarly community, he left academia to pursue a career as a writer. During his scroll years, he was described as "cavalier, impudent, cheerfully iconoclastic," but in time the hostility of the scholarly community left him "weary and disillusioned." In 1970, he committed scholarly suicide by publishing a book entitled The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, in which he argued that Jesus never existed but was merely an image produced by early Christians under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms, that Christianity began as an orgiastic mushroom cult. In a letter to the London Times, fourteen prominent British scholars, including his old Oxford mentor, Godfrey Driver, repudiated the book and his publisher apologized for publishing it. Allegro remained in academic and literary exile until his death at sixty-five in 1968.”
― Hershel Shanks, The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls