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Christianity

Philologist, archaeologist, and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Marco Allegro postulated that early Christian theology was derived from a fertility cult revolving around the entheogenic consumption of A. muscaria in his 1970 book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. This theory has found little support by scholars outside the field of ethnomycology. The book was widely criticized by academics and theologians, including Sir Godfrey Driver, emeritus Professor of Semitic Philology at Oxford University and Henry Chadwick, the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. Christian author John C. King wrote a detailed rebuttal of Allegro's theory in the 1970 book A Christian View of the Mushroom Myth; he notes that neither fly agarics nor their host trees are found in the Middle East, even though cedars and pines are found there, and highlights the tenuous nature of the links between biblical and Sumerian names coined by Allegro. He concludes that if the theory were true, the use of the mushroom must have been "the best kept secret in the world" as it was so well concealed for two thousand years.