In fact I actually like ["Life Of Brian"] better than the "Holy Grail". I know, I know, that's heretical...

I'd agree with you on that preference; in fact, I'd suggest that only religious people, or at least people with a religious background, will get some of the jokes in Life Of Brian. My favourite bit, for instance, is the bit where Cleese, as a Pharisee, mishears the Sermon On The Mount and starts building a whole theological edifice on his mishearing: "Well, obviously that's just a metaphor, and when He says 'Blessed are the cheesemakers' he's actually talking about all employees of the dairy industry." It's a much funnier version of Scorsese's point in The Last Temptation Of Christ about the gulf that can exist between what actually happened, and how history is written (a known bug in Christianity, which was FITNR when Allah dictated the Koran Himself).

Oh, and I'd always thought the loaves and fishes thing was a sociological story about Christ persuading people to share what they had with one another, not a stage-magic story about Christ pulling 5,000 fishes out of a top hat.

Peter