The Historical Jesus
Brian and the Apocalyptic Jesus Part 1
I have decided to give, in three installments, the paper that I read for the Life of Brian conference. It was written for a general audience, even though scholars were in the crowd as well. It includes some short clips from the movie, which I showed by way of Power point, and which my computer assistant on the Blog, Steve Ray, managed to load up here for us. What I have to say makes better sense with the clips (there is one in this installment and two in the third), so I recommend looking at them at the proper time in the paper. The rest is self-explanatory: so here is the opening bit of the paper. ************************************************************************************ When the Life of Brian came out in 1979, I was an earnest and devout 23-year old student at Princeton Theological Seminary, studying for ministry. Even though Princeton Seminary at the time was not, on the whole, strongly conservative in its theological orientation, I was. I had come to the school from Wheaton, an evangelical [...]