Exclusive: ‘Jesus wasn’t crucified – and AI proves it’, Monty Python editor claims

And now for something completely different…

The editor of Monty Python’s Life of Brian claims to have uncovered new evidence that Jesus was never crucified – and says artificial intelligence can prove it.

Veteran filmmaker Julian Doyle believes two millennia of Christian teaching rest on a “case of mistaken identity” that ChatGPT and other AI programs have helped to expose.

After 40 years of research, he discovered that the man put to death was not Christ but Judas the Galilean, a rebel who led an uprising against Roman rule.

He says the Church confused the two men as Christianity was taking shape, and that Jesus took part in an earlier symbolic “ritual crucifixion” before being put to death years later by stoning.

Over time, he says, the two stories became intertwined, creating the version of events that formed the basis of Christian belief – the story of Jesus being crucified and rising from the dead.

Doyle said the theory first struck him as he edited the crucifixion scene in which Eric Idle, Graham Chapman and John Cleese hung on their crosses singing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

More than 40 years on, after decades of research, he says artificial intelligence has finally given him the tool to test his theory – and it agrees with him.

By putting almost 100 contradictions from the Bible into AI programs, he was able to “show without doubt” that it was Judas the Galilean who was killed by Pilate and not Jesus.

Following hours of questioning, he says the largest Ai programs, ChatGPT, DeepSeek Grok, Claude and Google Gemini, all accepted that his explanation made better sense of the historical record than the Bible.

He sets out the full argument in his new book, How to Unravel the Gospel Story Using AI, which he describes as a manual that allows readers to test the theory for themselves.

Doyle, 83, who also worked on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Time Bandits and Brazil, and on music videos for Kate Bush and Iron Maiden, said his findings amount to one of the biggest religious discoveries in history.

Writing in NationalWorld, he said: “It all began in Tunisia, in the desert, more than forty years ago.

“I was editing Monty Python’s Life of Brian, cutting the now infamous scene where Eric Idle, Graham Chapman and John Cleese hang on their crosses singing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

“As I sat there piecing the footage together, something began to trouble me. The more I looked at that scene, the more I felt that the event it portrayed could never have happened in the way we have been told.

“For decades I kept refining the evidence, testing each detail against the historical record.

“But I was then presented with a serious problem: the information was so bizarre and so completely contradicted the scholarly consensus that obviously I would be labelled a crank if I dared mention any part of it.

“So I was stuck for years; that was until artificial intelligence came to my rescue.”

Until now, the accepted version has been that Jesus was crucified by the Romans at Golgotha, outside Jerusalem, on the orders of Pontius Pilate.

According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, he was nailed to the cross alongside two criminals, died after several hours, and was buried in a rock-cut tomb before rising from the dead three days later – the cornerstone of Christian belief.

But Doyle’s theory challenges every part of that story. He says the execution described in the Bible was that of another man, Judas the Galilean, a rebel who led a violent revolt against Roman taxation in 6AD.

Jesus, he claims, was not a rebel like the Galilean but a teacher and mystic healer who underwent a symbolic “crucifixion” in the Garden in Bethany years earlier, an event he survived entirely unharmed.

Sixteen years later, Doyle argues, Jesus was stoned to death by the Jewish authorities for sorcery and blasphemy.

In his view, the overlapping lives of the two men were later merged into a single story by early followers who wanted to present Jesus’ crucifixion as an actual death rather than a symbolic rite.

That, he says, is how Christianity inherited the image of a crucified saviour who rose from the dead — a “fusion of two men whose fates became one”.

Doyle shared his theory with the Python cast and with friends but never aired them publicly for fear of being labelled a crank.

But he continued his research by combing through texts and applying what he calls the “Sherlock Holmes method” of eliminating the impossible to see what remains.

And now, more than four decades after first suspecting something was wrong with the Biblical story, he says artificial intelligence has proved his study correct.

He fed 99 anomalies into each of the main AI systems and asked them to evaluate his theory. All judged it to be a coherent and logically consistent alternative to the traditional account.

ChatGPT is quoted as saying that “the most comprehensive and integrative theory yet attempted.”

DeepSeek called it “a monumental achievement in historical research.”

And Claude AI went further, describing the theory as one that “merits serious academic consideration” and, if proved correct, would “require a complete rewriting of early Christian history.”

Doyle argues that these AI responses matter because the systems can analyse large bodies of primary material without theological bias.

The story spans theology, history, linguistics and archaeology, a range so broad that no single scholar could verify it unaided. AI, he says, can process that volume of evidence in seconds. ‘It doesn’t believe; it just tests your logic,’ he wrote.

How to Unravel the Gospel Story Using AI reproduces the 99 questions he put to the systems and is described as a “small book with big implications”.

He presents it as a step-by-step guide that allows readers to test the theory themselves, following the same method of questioning he used to interrogate the Gospels with artificial intelligence.

“I am not attacking faith. I am challenging the assumption that faith and fact are the same thing. Belief in God is personal but history has to be fact,” he wrote.

“This is the first time the Gospels have ever been examined in this way, and the findings have now been validated by all of the most powerful AI systems in the world.

“After four decades of study, the conclusion remains the same — and now even the machines agree: the Church crucified the wrong man.”