A British filmmaker associated with Monty Python’s Life of Brian has renewed a long-standing and highly controversial claim that Jesus was never crucified, arguing that modern artificial intelligence tools can now demonstrate this conclusion with certainty.
Julian Doyle, a veteran editor and director who worked closely with the Monty Python team, says his research spans more than four decades and began during the editing of the now-famous crucifixion scene in Life of Brian. While assembling footage of actors hanging on crosses and singing, he says he became increasingly troubled by what he describes as inconsistencies between the scene’s imagery and the historical narrative commonly accepted within Christian tradition.
Doyle explains that the more he examined the crucifixion narrative, the more convinced he became that the event could not have occurred in the manner described by the Church. Over time, this doubt developed into a broader research project aimed at re-examining the foundations of the Gospel story itself.
After approximately forty years of investigation, Doyle now claims that the individual executed by the Roman authorities was not Jesus, but Judas the Galilean, a known rebel who led a violent uprising against Roman taxation around the year 6 CE. According to Doyle, Judas was executed by order of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and it was his death that later became central to the crucifixion narrative.
He argues that Jesus, by contrast, was neither a political rebel nor an insurrectionist. In his view, Jesus was a teacher and mystic healer who underwent an earlier symbolic ritual involving crucifixion imagery in the Garden at Bethany. Doyle claims this event was entirely non-lethal and ceremonial in nature. He further asserts that Jesus lived for many years after this ritual and was eventually put to death by stoning on charges of sorcery and blasphemy some sixteen years later.
According to Doyle, as early Christianity began to take shape, the lives and deaths of Judas the Galilean and Jesus were gradually merged into a single story. He argues that this fusion produced the version of events that became central to Christian belief, namely the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In his formulation, Christianity inherited what he describes as a combined narrative of two distinct men whose separate fates were transformed into one theological account.
Doyle states that this theory first took shape while he was working on the crucifixion sequence in Life of Brian, where actors Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, and John Cleese appeared on crosses. He says the visual logic of the scene, even in a satirical context, highlighted historical and practical problems that he could not reconcile with the traditional Gospel account.
Despite continuing his research for decades, Doyle says he refrained from presenting his conclusions publicly. He explains that the scale of contradiction with established scholarship meant that any attempt to publish his findings would likely result in him being dismissed as irrational or unserious. As a result, he continued refining his evidence privately, comparing textual sources and historical records while testing each claim against what he describes as objective logic.
This impasse, Doyle says, lasted for years until the emergence of artificial intelligence tools capable of processing large volumes of data. He claims that AI provided a way to evaluate his theory without theological commitments or institutional bias. By his account, he submitted nearly one hundred contradictions drawn from the Bible into multiple major AI systems and asked them to assess whether his explanation offered a more coherent reading of the historical record.
Doyle states that several leading AI platforms accepted his theory as logically consistent and more internally coherent than the traditional crucifixion narrative. He claims that systems such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Grok, Claude, and Google Gemini all responded favourably when presented with his structured argument. According to Doyle, these systems concluded that the execution described in the Gospels aligns more closely with the historical profile of Judas the Galilean than with that of Jesus.
He further claims that one AI system described his work as the most comprehensive and integrative theory yet attempted, while another characterised it as a major achievement in historical research. A third reportedly stated that the theory warrants serious academic consideration and, if proven accurate, would necessitate a complete rewriting of early Christian history. Doyle emphasises that these responses matter, in his view, because AI systems analyse information without belief or faith, focusing solely on logical consistency and available data.
Doyle has compiled his findings in a book titled How to Unravel the Gospel Story Using AI. He presents the book as a practical manual that allows readers to replicate his method step by step. The publication reproduces the ninety-nine questions he posed to artificial intelligence systems and explains how each was used to interrogate the Gospel narratives.
He describes the work as a small book with far-reaching implications, arguing that the scope of the evidence spans theology, history, linguistics, and archaeology. Doyle contends that no single scholar could reasonably assess such a wide range of material unaided, whereas AI can process and compare these bodies of information within seconds.
In explaining his motivation, Doyle insists that he is not attempting to attack faith itself. Rather, he says his objective is to challenge the assumption that faith and historical fact are identical. He argues that belief in God is a personal matter, while historical claims must remain subject to critical examination and verification.
He maintains that this is the first time the Gospel accounts have been examined using artificial intelligence in this manner and claims that the results have now been validated across multiple advanced systems. After four decades of research, he says, his conclusion has remained unchanged, and he now argues that even machine analysis supports his view that the Church crucified the wrong man.
From an Islamic standpoint, the claim that Jesus was never crucified is not new and aligns with established Islamic belief, which holds that Jesus was not killed nor crucified, but that the matter was made to appear so. However, Doyle’s argument is rooted in his own historical reconstruction and use of modern technology, rather than in Islamic revelation, and continues to provoke debate across religious and academic communities.
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