Alvar Ellegård

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Alvar Ellegård, born 1919 in Gothenburg, Sweden, is emeritus professor at Gothenburg University. He is also a member of the scientific board of the Swedish National Encyclopedia. To the general public he is recognized for questioning confessional "truths" by scientific methods.

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

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's idea was that Jesus was the leader of the Essenes at Qumran a couple of hundred years before our time and that it was St. Paul who developed Christianity through his contacts with the sect that kept the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Damascus Document gives support to this theory. According to this document the Essenes moved to Damascus outside Jerusalem. Ellegård interprets this as 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 and as a result started a new religion.

[edit] Selected publications

The Auxiliary Do (thesis, 1953)
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 (Swedish)
Jesus – One Hundred Years Before Christ: A Study In Creative Mythology, (London 1999). ISBN 0-87951-720-4