Samuel George Frederick Brandon (1907 – 21 October 1971) was a British Anglican priest and scholar of comparative religion.
[7] As he flew over the Mediterranean Sea on 21 October 1971, he died of an infection he had contracted while working in Egypt.
His most celebrated position is a controversial one that echoes the works of Hermann Reimarus,[9] that the historical Jesus was a political 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.
[10] 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.
[11] Brandon also claimed that the Pauline epistles and the accounts of Jesus Christ found in the Gospels represented two opposing factions of Christianity, a view first proposed by 19th century Hegelian theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur.