Alvar Ellegård

Alvar Ellegård (12 November 1919 – 8 February 2008), born in Gothenburg, Sweden, was a Swedish scholar and linguist. He was an emeritus professor of English at the University of Gothenburg. He was also a member of the academic board of the Swedish National Encyclopedia. He is most widely known for his books about the conflict between religious dogma and science and his promotion of the Jesus myth hypothesis.

Scholarly career

In 1953 he was appointed associate professor of English as a result of his thesis The Auxiliary Do. He was a professor of the English language at Gothenburg University between 1962 and 1984.

His book Darwin and the General Reader (1958) is a detailed study of the changes in British public opinion which took place following the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species. It is based on an analysis of the periodical press of the period.

Writings on Christianity

After retirement Professor Ellegård started a new line of research into the Historicity of Jesus. In his book Myten om Jesus (The myth about Jesus) he presents new theories about the Dead Sea Scrolls and their association with the early history of Christianity. Ellegård argues that the original Jesus was identical to the Teacher of Righteousness, who was the leader of the Essenes at Qumran about 150 years years earlier than the time of the Gospels, and that it was St. Paul who created Christianity through his contacts with the sect that kept the Dead Sea Scrolls.

According to Ellegård, the Damascus Document gives support to this theory. The document states that the Essenes moved to Damascus outside Jerusalem, but the word "Damascus" appears to being used symbolically to refer to exile. Ellegård interprets this as one evidence that the "Damascus" that is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles in fact is Qumran. St. Paul was on his way to Damascus when he had a vision of Jesus.

Selected publications

• The Auxiliary Do (thesis, 1953)
• Darwin and the General Reader (1958)
• A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship (1962)
• The Syntactic Structure of English Texts (1978)
• Myten om Jesus: den tidigaste kristendomen i nytt ljus, Bonniers (Stockholm 1992). ISBN 91-34-51245-4 Template:Sv icon
• Jesus – One Hundred Years Before Christ: A Study In Creative Mythology, (London 1999). ISBN 0-87951-720-4