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.