The group began “taking the idea seriously,” seeing as “nobody had made a biblical comedy film” before. So they started developing Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory in earnest, even watching old Charlton Heston movies as research. In his diaries, Palin describes early conversations about making Monty Python and the Life of Christ with characters such as “Ron the Baptist.”
But when it came time to write the script, the group felt that they couldn’t “just take the Bible story and parody or Pythonise every well-known event.” As Idle claimed: “It became clear early on that we couldn’t make fun of Christ since what he says is very fine,” but that “the people around him were hilarious, and still are!” Hence the reason why the focus of the story was shifted from Jesus to “St. Brian” and, eventually, just Brian.