I need to take a hiatus from my thread on textual alterations of the NT (you may be relieved to know!) in order to make some posts on the Life of Brian Conference, called “Jesus and Brian” that was held this past weekend at Kings College London.   I will not be giving my personal blow-by-blow account.  One of the attendees, Mark Goodacre, a friend and colleague who teaches New Testament at cross-town rival Duke, who has been a huge fan of Monty Python as well as the genre of the “Jesus film” for most of the years of his conscious being, is himself doing so, and has given me permission to use his account to inform you of what happened each day (although he had to leave before the third and final day, which happened to be the day on which I read my own paper).

After this present short introductory post I’ll provide Mark’s post(s), and then possibly over the course of three posts or so give you the paper that I read.

For all of this, I’d suggest strongly (I’d suggest this strongly even if it were not for this!) that you watch the Life of Brian, if you have never done so; and that you watch it again if you’ve seen it before.   I’ve seen it roughly 93 gazillion times, and I have to say, it simply never gets old.  It is extraordinarily clever, witty, and thought-provoking.   When it was released, it was condemned as blasphemous – principally by pious Christians who had not seen it and did not actually know what it was about.  It was banned in parts of the U.K. and the U.S.   But it had a huge following and is today often named as the greatest comedy ever to come out of the U.K.

The movie was NOT…

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