S. G. F. Brandon

Samuel George Frederick Brandon (1907–1971) was an English Anglican priest and scholar of comparative religion. He became professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester in 1951.

Born in Devon in 1907, Brandon was a graduate of the University of Leeds. He was ordained as a priest in 1932 after Anglican training at Mirfield, and then spent seven years as a parish priest before enrolling as an army chaplain in the Second World War, after which he began a successful academic career in 1951 as an historian of religion. Brandon's most influential work, Jesus and the Zealots, was published in 1967, wherein he advanced the claim that Jesus fitted well within the ideology of the anti-Roman Zealot group.

He was elected general secretary of the International Association for the History of Religions in 1970.

As he flew over the Mediterranean Sea on 21 October 1971, he died of an infection he had contracted while working in Egypt.

His thinking on New Testament themes grew out of The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church (1951). His most celebrated position is the controversial one, that a political Jesus was a revolutionary figure, influenced in that by the Zealots; this he argued in the 1967 book Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity. The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth (1968) raises again, amongst other matters, the question of how the Fall of the Temple in 70 CE shaped the emerging Christian faith, and in particular the Gospel of Mark.

He was a critic of the myth-ritual theory, writing a 1958 essay "The Myth and Ritual Position Critically Examined" attacking its assumptions.

Brandon also claimed that the Pauline epistles and the accounts of Jesus Christ found in the Gospels represented two opposing factions of Christianity.

• The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church (1951)
• Time and Mankind: An Historical and Philosophical Study of Mankind's Attitude to the Phenomena of Change (1954)
• Man and His Destiny in the Great Religions: An Historical and Comparative Study (1962)
• Creation Legends of the Ancient Near East (1963)
• History, Time, and Deity (1965)
• The Judgment of the Dead: The Idea of Life After Death in the Major Religions (1967)
• Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (1967)
• The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth (1968)
• Religion in Ancient History: Studies in Ideas, Men, and Events (1969)
• Ancient Empires (1970)

As editor

• The Saviour God: Comparative Studies in the Concept of Salvation (1963)
• A Dictionary of Comparative Religion (1970)