DAVE ALLEN IS A SERIAL PLAGIARIST AND DOES NOT GIVE PROPER ATTRIBUTION

So, I am not going to need much commentary on this one, but needless to say that Dave Allen has turned out to be quite the individual. I was made aware that on his FaceBook page he posted a comment about all the references to Jesus in the Pauline authentic corpus. Here is the post:

Well, that is a cool post. I wonder who actually wrote it? So I got to the portion where the text reads “temperate personality, not boastful, proud, or seeking self-pleasure” and then was hit with a profound sense of déjà vu. Why? Because I wrote that. I wrote basically that whole post. This comes from a 2020 blog post I did on my old website. Dave evidently didn’t know that since I use WIX and I only de-published the website (not delete), I still have ALL of my old blogposts. Also my post was better. I spent a month collecting all those references and providing all the quotations as well:

Also in my original post, I specified all the quotations were from the NIV, I just didn’t have this in the crop I took of the post. Regardless, since we are doing proper attribution, thought y’all should know.

So yeah, Dave plagiarized my blog post. There is no proper attribution, or anything. This is not the only place it turns out that he plagiarized my work. Years ago, to organize my thoughts on mythicism, I wrote a small booklet on debunking mythicism just for me, and I shared it with Dave (who then decided to share it in all his groups against my will). He used that draft for a ton of stuff, but you can see it in places where he will just steal my citations in the exact order I give them in the book. For instance, here is from his blog post entitled, “The brother of the Lord” published on his website on 1 Jan 2022:

Those references are all from page 34 of my draft, in the exact order that I give them. He then also has this segment:

This is from my draft as well (page 34)

All he did was change “second” to “third” and added just a few remarks, but nothing of note. He just steals from me.

After posting about this on Facebook in a group on historical Jesus, I was then made aware of further plagiarism on Dave’s part by Christopher Lawson. Lawson had an unpublished book manuscript on Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it is quite extensive. Allen’s blog posts crib from it quite a bit with no attribution. For instance, here is Dave’s post:

And here are some tidbits from it (I screencap these so Dave cannot just hide evidence and delete them):

Now compare that to Christopher Lawson’s original book manuscript on page 23:

He even copied the hard-return before “-4Q541” and also all of Lawson’s editorial notes about the quotation. Even worse. Dave’s post has even more instances of stealing from Lawson:

Lawson wrote (47):

Dave even copies the “aka” bit and steals from Lawson’s specific translation of these passages. Also because he was copypasting, it failed to take into account that the “a” after “Document” was a superscript, so Allen’s post has “Documenta” instead.

In fact, just about every time Dave quotes from the DSS in this post, he is stealing these from Lawson, along with commentary notes and such. (here). But it is not just translations he stole from Lawson. He stole the whole of Lawson’s commentary on these works as well. Here is what Dave wrote:

And here is Lawson’s original book (page 113):

Dave is just shameless. And as his blogpost currently stands there is not a single citation of Lawson anywhere. I saved his blogpost as a PDF and also archived it just to ensure he cannot go change it later and pretend like I am making things up (which he has done before). Similar to Lawson and myself, Dave also plagiarized my friend Scott, who ran an older blog that is no longer active. However, in the same “The brother of the Lord” blogpost that Dave made, he also plagiarized Scott’s. Here is Dave (relevant sections highlighted) writing in 2022:

And here is Scott’s original post from 2018:

So yeah, already found three people who were plagiarized on his blogposts. But what about his academic writings?

Dave’s attribution problems are not just limited to his plagiarism. My belief is that he probably cribs quotations from different works, throws them in a document, and at best only puts a name to them, but then forgets about where his citations come from. Why do I think this? Because in his published papers in the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (here), and Revista Bíblica (here and here), you find the following quotation from one Johannes Nussbaum:

This quotation is on page 337 of his article “How Josephus Really Viewed Jesus.” In his reprint of his JGRChJ article made in Revista Bíblica retitled “A Proposal,” you find it on page 218. As Dave cannot read German (which I know firsthand) I am fairly certain this is Google translated. It is specifically his lack of ability to read German that makes the following stand out. I was very confused when I tried to track down this paper. Why, because Dave Allen cites it as this:

Notably, Dave apparently does not know what page number this quotation was on, because in every single publication he cites the quote, he only gives the complete page range of the entire article. Here is from his “A Proposal” 218:

And here is from “How Josephus Really Viewed Jesus” 337:

But here is the problem. I went to Novum Testamentum, the journal that supposedly published this paper and… I did not find any paper from Johannes Nussbaum meeting this description. But you know what I did find? This:

Yeah that is the same page range, article title, journal, etc. But… it is Ulrich Victor’s paper. So this is why I know Dave seems to be just cribbing citations and not knowing where he got them from. Because he misattributed Ulrich Victor’s paper to Johannes Nussbaum, and falsely claimed that his Google translated quotation was in this paper, but could not cite a specific page number. This demonstrates (A) Dave cannot read German, and (B) Dave is not carefully attributing sources. Instead, this belongs to Nussbaum’s 2017 undergraduate thesis turned in at the University of Zurich.

Dave is a plagiarist and Dave practices unhealthy methods of collecting sources and quotations. In my case, I am not sure he meant to be malicious, but in Lawson’s case there is evidence of clear systemic plagiarism going on. Dave also has no excuse at this point, as he was already writing papers for inclusion in the Journal of Higher Criticism at this point. He knows how attribution works.

In fact, on that point, I decided to look at something. I know for a fact that Dave does not actually understand or know the ancient languages in question, and had to receive extensive help to get his work published. What I noticed in his JGRChJ paper is that he has a ton of quotations but… the ancient ones are frequently not given attribution for the translations. For instance, here is his quotation of Justin Martyr (page 129):

Dave gives no attribution to this quotation. However, as we know from the very useful NewAdvent website, this is cribbed from the 19th century Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (1885) and the translation was from Marcus Dods and George Reith. Dave stole this quotation and probably thought it was fine because it was public domain. This is not okay. How about the next quotation from Lucian?

This is just stolen word for word from the 1936 Loeb no. 302 edition by A. M. Harmon, again with no attribution. On page 135 of “Model Reconstruction” we then get:

This quotation is stolen from Robin Hard’s translation with the Oxford Classics series (here). A nearly identical one is also found in Scott Durr’s book (here). Whatever the case, this is clearly not Allen’s translation but is cribbed from another source, and a recent one at that.

Allen does not even produce his own versions of scripture. In this case (page 138), he cites John 11.47–50, but there is no attribution:

But this is actually just stolen from the NIV translation. Similarly his quotation of 1 Thessalonians 2:14–15 on the same page derives from the NIV, again without attribution.

His next citation (page 141) is to Origen, Contra Celsum 8.14. He cribbed this from online again:

Per NewAdvent this is again another one taken from the Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 4 (1885) translated by Frederick Crombie.

That covers his “Model Reconstruction.” Notably, many of these exact same quotations are found again cribbed in his reprint paper “A Proposal” (pages both published in Revista Bíblica. In fact it also has other plagiarism. Here is his quotation of Michael the Syrian’s version of the Testimonium Flavianum (page 216):

This is stolen from Shlomo Pines’ amazing study An Arabic Version of the. Testimonium Flavianum and its Implications (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1971). On page 221, Allen then steals two more quotations of Origen from the Ante-Nicene Fathers, cited above and translated by Crombie:

Just to tell you how poor Allen is at editing his stolen quotations, he even forgot to remove the ending quotation marks. It is clear he stole these from NewAdvent probably. In context, these are quotations from Celsus contained in Origen’s text. The quotation marks differentiate Celsus’ language from Origen’s. Allen either forgot to omit the last quotation mark or include the initial ones. Either way, plagiarism at work. His quotation (page 221) of Lactantius seems to be stolen from here. You can tell this because he uses the “V.3” to cite the passage, which he never uses elsewhere. The “V.3” refers to “volume 3” or “book 3” and is clearly from either Horbury or someone from around that time, as this indicates:

In a particularly egregious one, Allen steals a portion of Leeming and Leeming’s (here) translation of the Slavonic Jewish War (“Model Reconstruction” 137):

I could continue but it doesn’t really bear much more repeating at this point. I’ll just point out that in his “Model Reconstruction” paper alone, I found that every single one of the following sources had a stolen translation that is unattributed:

Photius, Bibliotheca 238; Origen, Contra Celsum 1.47, 1.48, 2.12, 3.7, 8.14; Justin Martyr, 1 Apology 14; Lucian, Peregrinus 8; Josephus, Ant. 17.285, 18.85–87; Epictetus, Diatribe 4.7.6; Mark 14:70; John 6:15, 11:47–50; Old Church War on Allen 2022, 137; 1 Thess. 2:14–15; Tacitus, Annals 15.44.

These can be found on Allen “Model Reconstruction,” pages 118–20, 129–30, 135–41. Just so you know… ALL of his papers are like this.

In his paper, “How Josephus Really Viewed Jesus,” 351 we see, for instance, stealing scripture citations from the NIV (again) without attribution:

On the previous page (350) he steals a quotation of the Jewish War, from the public domain Whiston translation (here):

The same page also cribs a translation of the Jewish War 4.388.

And here is the kicker of all of this. Dave Allen knows he needs to cite his translations. Why? Because he does it elsewhere in this very same article (page 349):

And here are the footnotes:

So Dave knows to give attribution, and he was just either too lazy to do it in these other cases, or did not think anyone would notice. Either way, it is the same conclusion: he is a thief and academically dishonest.

That Allen’s theory of “writing” is copy-paste is proven by a looking at drafts (which I was able to obtain) of his papers. For instance, here is from the draft of “How Josephus Really Viewed Jesus”:

Notice that the fonts change size and style. This is a clear indicator of copy-pasting work. In this case, it appears that Allen is primarily plagiarizing himself and copy-pasting his blog posts and similar.

Conclusions

Dave Allen is a serial plagiarist. Hide your translations and commentaries from him, because he will shamelessly steal your hard work, give you no attribution, and take all the credit. And even if he does “cite” you, you’d better hope you are writing in English, because if you write in another language he is probably going to confuse you with another source and misattribute your work anyway.

Allen’s papers should be retracted for plagiarism and general defectiveness. The journals should be alerted to this and take action immediately.

Allen has since nuked his social media accounts. If you are wondering if he took accountability for his theft… you’ve not really kept up with how plagiarists behave. Here is how he responded to the news (for context it was shared in a group adminned by Jacob Berman, aka HistoryValley):

So there you have it. I’m the asshole for ousting a plagiarist. Not the actual thief, who took people’s work, their livelihood and product that they put years of effort into, and passed it off as his own. I’m the a-hole, despite the fact he is the one whole stole FROM ME! This is how you know you have lost.

EDIT:

I have since been contacted by more people saying that Dave plagiarized them, especially on his blogs. Given the evidence of this also includes his papers, we can safely conclude that ALL of his writing is infected with this academic dishonesty.