Let’s get this out of the way... Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a comedic and satirical masterpiece. There are so many scenes which stand out as personal favourites, but here I am focusing on a very specific part of one of the most famous scenes – the (attempted) stoning of Matthias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath on the charge of blasphemy.
Even within this scene, there are several aspects that could be looked at...
· the bloodthirsty women, keen to mete out capital punishment, wearing beards so as not to be recognised as women
· the various false starts
· Matthias’ increasingly blasé approach to his blasphemy and how further blasphemy could not make it worse...
· John Cleese’s suspicious and increasing exasperated (and then dead) Jewish official
However, my favourite part of scene of none of those. Instead, my favourite part only appears for a combined total of 4 seconds, 2 secs at the beginning and 2 secs at the end – the Roman sentries watching the proceedings.
They (along with two other guards holding Matthias) essentially take on the role of the ‘straight men’ of the scene, the participant expected to maintain deadpan composure in the face of the increasing eccentricity, verging on derangement, of the Jewish official, Matthias and bearded stoning-throwing women.
It is almost certainly reading too much into the scene and its writing/planning, but despite their very limited screen time, these two unnamed Roman sentries manage to do something that usually takes full books – they sum up the clash of civilisations that was occurring in first century Judaea between the Romans and the Jews.
At the end in particular, after the stoning has descended into debacle, on top of bored and exhausted body language, a small turn of the head almost seems to say “should we intervene?”, answered with a negative head shake of “No, leave the Jews to it” – almost an admittance of a lack of understanding and that their own involvement might only make things worse.
It must be said that in purely historical terms, such soldiers in Jerusalem in AD33 were likely to have been Judaean auxiliaries. There does not appear to have been a legionary garrison in Judaea until the Great Jewish Revolt began in AD66, although Claudius briefly planned for these auxiliary cohorts to be transferred to Pontus and be replaced by Syrian legionaries, only to relent (Zeichman (2018) 93-98).
Furthermore, rank-and-file legionaries serving in Rome’s Syrian forces were likely ethnic Greeks or even Samaritans, under the command of Roman citizen locals. Either through ignorance or wilful antagonism, there is persistent evidence of provocative and anti-Semitic behaviour from the soldiers stationed in Judaea throughout the period in the run up to the outbreak of the Great Jewish Revolt in AD66.
This more ‘hands-on’ policing, cultural insensitivity and outright socio-religious provocation is hinted at in Life of Brian. While we have the non-interventionist sentries at the stoning, we also have the ‘heavy-handed bluster masking incompetence’ shown by other Roman officials – John Cleese’ centurion being a prime example with ‘Romanes eunt domus’ and the failed searches of the People’s Front of Judaea meeting house. However, there is a much darker example of appalling behaviour by Roman soldiers in Life of Brian – Brian’s mother, Mandy Cohen, was a victim of rape by the centurion Naughtius Maximus.
This all goes to show that beneath the timeless humour of Life of Brian lies a dark and historic pattern in the history of the Near East – the inability and even unwillingness of the various peoples to live together in peace.
The writers and performers of Monty Python’s Flying Circus went to great lengths to present Roman Judaea in an accurate light – a cauldron of political, social and religious dissatisfaction ripe for radical revolution, militant insurgency and Messianic preaching, even when it was used for comic and satirical effect, but they cannot have imagined that their efforts would garner academic interest 35 years later.
The growth and acceptance of ‘reception studies’ as an important academic aspect of many a subject, in this case Biblical Studies and Ancient History, meant that in June 2014 an academic Jesus and Brian conference was held by the Department of Theology and Religious Studies of King’s College, London. Together with dozens of academics, two Pythons, John Cleese and Life of Brian director Terry Jones, looked into various aspects of the film and its reception. Several of these talks were then written up, edited together, and published as a volume of academic papers in 2015 and it available and accessible to all.
In that spirit of academic rigour, it must also be said that such public stonings in Roman Judaea are “historically questionable.” There are no examples of stoning as punishment for adultery or blasphemy in the Tanakh, while Jesus dodges the question over whether a woman guilty of adultery should be stoned, refusing to answer (Levine in Taylor (2015) 178).
Bibliography
Levine, A-J. ‘Beards for Sale: The Uncut Version of Brian, Gender and Sexuality’, in Taylor, J.E. Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times Via Monty Python's Life of Brian. London (2015) 167-184
Taylor, J.E. Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times Via Monty Python's Life of Brian. London (2015)
Zeichman, C.B. ‘Military Forces in Judaea 6–130 CE: The status quaestionis and Relevance for New Testament Studies’, CBR 17 (2018) 86-120