Monty Python's Life of Brian: The British Farce Jesus Movie
Ash Wednesday
Today is Ash Wednesday. Welcome to Lent 2024.
I grew up evangelical, so I had never even heard the word Lent until sometime in high school. Giving something up for six weeks (usually chocolate) became trendy in evangelical spaces during the mid to late ’90s, although no other Lenten traditions were ever observed. (At least in my experience.) No ashen crosses drawn on our foreheads. Meat was allowed on Fridays. (I didn’t even know it wasn’t.) There were no Easter Vigil masses to attend. The liturgical year was not observed apart from Christmas Day, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. Most of us weren’t aware that there even was a liturgical year.
I learned all about Lent (and Advent) when I was going through the process of becoming Catholic almost 20 years ago. I found the concept of church seasons and the religious rituals for them intriguing. I don’t remember ever learning any spiritual practices in evangelical youth groups or summer camps. Everything really just boiled down to read your Bible during quiet times, go to church, memorize Bible verses, pray before meals, and witness to your friends. Although we were never actually taught how to read the Bible or how to pray. How to practice was never a part of the conversation (conversion?).
This Lent, I’m doing something a little different. I’m not giving up chocolate, or anything else really. This publication — Alternatively Practicing — is all about finding alternative ways to practice faith. Whatever faith you might have. It doesn’t even have to be Christian; that’s just the lens I use. It can be simple faith in yourself if that’s where you are.
I have always loved film, TV series, acting, musical theatre, and drama. Part of what fuelled my first really thorough deconstruction back in the early 2000s was a film. Films are an excellent way to deconstruct the beliefs you were indoctrinated with as a kid. When you didn’t know any better. When you weren’t exposed to anything else. They’re especially good if they were created by people who are not Christian or who practice a different kind of Christianity than what you’re familiar with. There are several movies that were basically blacklisted in my church youth group which I have since watched and either enjoyed or didn’t really understand the level of controversy surrounding them. Dogma. The Exorcist. Stigmata. The Last Temptation of Christ. Once I started deconstructing, any film that got fundamentalists’ knickers in a twist merely piqued my interest. The Golden Compass. (Although the books and more recent HBO series are both much better.) Saved! The Da Vinci Code. (The book here is also preferable to the movie.) Benedetta. They make you think differently and see things from an alternate angle that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.
All of the films that I have chosen for this series have something about them that makes them stand out. They all break the mold in at least one way. Every single one of them had some aspect of controversy when they were first released, although some more so than others. (Some waaaaaay more so than others.)
First out of the gate this Ash Wednesday is the British classic: Monty Python’s Life of Brian. This was the second Monty Python movie I ever watched. The first was, of course, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. One glorious afternoon back in 7th grade, my physics teacher wheeled the science department’s TV into our classroom for us to watch a movie. I guess it was a slow day or finals week or something because it wasn’t Bill Nye the Science Guy or anything educational like that. I had never experienced British humor before, but I was hooked. Monty Python’s Life of Brian found its way into my VCR a few years later.
I rewatched the movie before writing this article, and I was surprised by how much I had forgotten. For example, Jesus barely shows up. We get to see him in two short scenes, but he’s really not integral to the story at all. The first appearance is the cold open where the Magi deliver their gifts to Baby Brian sleeping in a manger next to his mother instead of the Baby Jesus in the stable around the corner. They quickly correct their mistake, plucking the gold, frankincense, and myrrh from Brian’s mother’s arms. The second scene occurs a few decades later when Brian and his mother are attempting to listen to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from the back row. Being stuck so far back in the crowd, no one can actually hear him all that well. This is where we get classic British lines like, “Blessed are the cheesemakers? What’s so special about the cheesemakers?” Brilliant.
But that got me thinking about first-century crowd control. How did they get everyone to shut the fuck up and listen when they had no sound systems or microphones or anything? There had to have been a lot of hecklers too. And not just the religious or political villains of the story that you would expect to turn up, but also all the randos out there in the crowd being difficult simply for the sake of being difficult. Just like with stand-up comedians these days at clubs, I imagine Jesus had to have had an arsenal of quippy comebacks, didn’t get easily annoyed, and was quick on his feet. He must have had more in common with modern-day comedians than modern-day preachers. Especially those of the scammy televangelist variety.
One of the best scenes is when Brian is trying to evade the Roman soldiers who want to arrest him for vandalism, but the crowd listening to his bullshitting has suddenly decided that what he’s saying is über-profound. He must be the messiah! They chase him out past the city gates, convincing themselves that they’re seeing miracles, signs, and wonders right and left when nothing special is happening at all. Brian tries to reason with them, but they’re not actually interested in listening to anything he’s telling them. Honestly, it’s a pretty good comedic adaptation of the gospels themselves. No one was really listening to Jesus’ teachings or parables or anything back then either. He gets a bit annoyed with his own followers about it too. I guess a lot of people think it’s irreverent to depict it this way, but whatever. It works. Maybe Jesus likes a bit of irreverence. He did trash the temple courtyard after all. He had his reasons.
The pivotal scene for me is when the crowd has followed Brian home and he tries to actually teach them. Just to get them out of his hair, but it ends up being kind of profound.
“You’re all individuals!” Brian yells at them from the balcony.
Their response, in unison, “Yes, we’re all individuals!”
“You’re all different!” Brian reiterates.
Again, as one, “Yes, we’re all different!”
They just aren’t getting it. Their infatuation with his celebrity overpowers anything he’s actually telling them on an intellectual level.
“You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves! Don’t let anyone tell you what to do!” Maybe that’s a bit closer to Jesus’ actual teachings too.
In evangelicalism, it was always presented to us as, “you’re a depraved sinner and God hates you. But if you pray this magical Sinner’s Prayer, then God won’t see you. He will only see Jesus.” There was no incentive to actually change anything about our lives. The Get Out of Jail Free Card criticism of this kind of Christianity is actually a pretty valid point. If you don’t put in the work — the inner work of transformation — that what’s the point? Are you really changing? Or saved, as evangelicals would put it?
The Sermon on the Mount — the core of Jesus’ actual teachings — isn’t about believing the right things. None of it is. It isn’t a creed in that sense at all. It’s all about action. Working it out for ourselves. Maybe that’s the narrow way. Not evangelicalism’s emphasis on the purity of attending church multiple times a week, killing yourself with uncompensated volunteer work, voting for the most conservative/reactionary political candidates possible no matter how many people their policies hurt, and taking up every culture war issue that Jesus never actually said a single word about. Maybe the narrow way isn’t about purity in the English sense of the word, but in its original sense. Wholeness. Integrating with the rest of humanity, the rest of creation, the rest of the cosmos.
In my experience, humor has always been severely lacking in most evangelical spaces. And Western Christianity as a whole. The multiple-hour church services of my youth were frequently filled with screaming, red-faced pastors verbally assaulting their parishioners with threats of hell, damnation, demons, vivid descriptions of the torture and death of Jesus, and fabricated End Times prophecies. All things meant to traumatize, to instill fear, to scare straight. Mainstream American Christianity is a traumatic experience. An exercise in trauma. It is devoid of healing. No wonder younger generations are checking themselves out of the entire enterprise.
But from some of the little biblical scholarship I’ve encountered either online or in the various books I’ve read, a lot of humor in the gospels and the rest of the Christian Scriptures gets lost in translation. First of all, Jesus would have been speaking in his native language, Aramaic, but most of the gospels were written in Koine Greek. (One or two may have originally been written in Aramaic, but they were then widely dispersed in Greek translations.) But when scholars go back and rework the language to how it would have been received in the first century with its original meanings, cultural relevance, puns, jokes, and plays on words, there is quite a bit of humor to be found. Jokes. Sarcasm. Even a vicious insult or two. But we’ve got two millennia of (mis)translations from Aramaic to Koine Greek to the Latin Vulgate to the KJV. Things come across a lot more dour when using King James English than they were originally intended. That carried over into modern media as well. Jesus is pretty wooden in a lot of biblical films — both Hollywood epics and faith-based Christian media. It makes you wonder how he made such a splash back in the day if he was really so surly, somber, and lacking in both personality and charisma.
Some of the best resources I’ve come across in the past 10–15 years or so in this regard haven’t come from Christian media. This movie, Life of Brian, was created by the Monty Python troupe. Hardly a bastion of Christian values and entertainment. One of my all-time favorite books — Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal — is not a Christian novel at all. But everyone I’ve gifted it to — from quite religious family members to atheist friends — have loved it. It’s a hilarious retelling of the life of Christ beginning in childhood from the perspective of his (totally fictional) dipshit best friend Biff. Then there are the incarnations in popular media like this great Key & Peele sketch. Comedy humanizes. It builds bridges and discovers commonalities better than any fear-mongering preacher ever could.
Anyway, I don’t think Jesus would have any issues with Monty Python’s Life of Brian. A lot of uptight Christians and religious institutions might, but they don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to actually following the teachings of the guy they claim to love, honor, and revere.
