"I am the Messiah!" – what does being a messiah truly mean, and why do some people claim to be one?
In this episode, we will explore the stories of various people throughout history who have claimed to be the messiah, anointed by God to save mankind.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Messiah, the promised one.
[00:00:26] But, don’t worry, this is not going to be a religious episode.
[00:00:31] In fact, we’re not really going to talk about the Messiah at all. Instead, we will explore the stories of various people throughout history who have claimed to be the messiah, anointed by God to save mankind.
[00:00:44] And as we’ll see, it doesn’t tend to end very well.
[00:00:49] Ok then, let’s get right into it.
[00:00:53] In the classic 1979 Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, there is a famous scene where the main character, Brian, is hiding in his house.
[00:01:05] Outside the window is a crowd chanting his name, saying “there he is, the chosen one has spoken”.
[00:01:15] Brian’s mother is furious, and she asks her son what on Earth is going on.
[00:01:22] She then sticks her head out of the window to the crowd chanting “messiah” and shouts “he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy. Now go away!”
[00:01:34] It is one of the classic lines in British comedy, and if you haven’t ever watched The Life of Brian, perhaps you should pause this episode right now and go and watch it, because it is just a brilliant film.
[00:01:48] Now, in the film the character Brian wasn’t the Messiah, he was a normal man who people had mistakenly identified as the messiah.
[00:01:59] But throughout history there are plenty of people who have claimed to actually have been the Messiah, to have been sent by some form of God to save mankind.
[00:02:11] Before we get into their individual stories, we should start with a brief definition of what “the messiah” means, as it might be slightly different to what you think.
[00:02:23] In most dictionaries you’ll find two definitions.
[00:02:28] One will be something like “Jesus Christ”, and the other will be something along the lines of “the promised and expected deliverer of the Jewish people”.
[00:02:39] And to remind you of an important distinction, Jesus was Jewish but he is not considered to be “The Messiah” in Judaism, although he is the Messiah in Christianity.
[00:02:52] Right, that is the first and last bit of theology we’ll cover in this episode, but the reason to mention it is to remind you that “the Messiah” does not always refer to Jesus.
[00:03:05] Much more interesting than a theological discussion, or at least much more weird and unusual, is to talk about some of the more controversial recent figures who have claimed that they are either a reincarnation of Jesus Christ himself, some kind of relation, or a general Messiah-type figure.
[00:03:26] This little Messiah expedition will take us from Manchester to the United States, China to Korea and even to Siberia.
[00:03:35] And it is full of eccentric characters.
[00:03:40] Our first messiah-like figure is slightly unusual in that it is a woman.
[00:03:47] For reasons that psychologists and sociologists would no doubt have plenty of explanations for, deciding that you are Christ reincarnated seems to be something that is more common in men than women.
[00:04:00] But a woman called Ann Lee was an exception to this rule.
[00:04:06] She was born in Manchester, in England, in 1736, and at the age of 22, she joined a Protestant Christian sect called the Shaking Quakers.
[00:04:19] The Shaking Quakers were similar to The Quakers, but they were called “Shaking” Quakers because they believed that you could purify yourself by doing a kind of shaking dance.
[00:04:34] One of their core beliefs was that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman.
[00:04:42] And this woman, they soon started to believe, was none other than Ann Lee.
[00:04:49] It seems that she started to believe this herself, as she started to preach that she had been sent by God, she was the Messiah.
[00:04:59] Her core belief, and the message that was most prominent in her teachings, was to abstain from, to not engage in, all forms of sexual relations.
[00:05:11] She believed that sexual contact was the original sin that Adam and Eve had committed, and by avoiding all forms of sex, one could attain salvation.
[00:05:23] Ann Lee had learned this the hard way, or at least she had come to this conclusion through personal experience.
[00:05:32] She had got married, and had fallen pregnant four times, but each one had resulted in a miscarriage, which one imagines would explain her view that sex was evil and sinful.
[00:05:45] As her followers grew, she found herself coming up against the law multiple times, and was arrested and sent to prison on numerous occasions.
[00:05:56] To try to escape what she saw as religious persecution, she set sail for the land of the free, America, basing herself in New York State and recruiting new members to her updated version of the “Shaking Quakers”, who were now simply called the “Shakers”.
[00:06:14] The group did grow, peaking at around 6,000 members, but it struggled to grow much past this.
[00:06:22] For a cult to grow its members need to multiply, to have children, but the problem was that sex was prohibited for the Shakers.
[00:06:32] Members had to adopt children, and the fact that you had to give up all sexual relations if you wanted to join the group, well, it can’t have been a huge attraction to potential new members.
[00:06:45] And Lee, like several of the other characters we’ll hear about today, found herself not only on the wrong side of the law but also coming up against some members of the public who were not so sympathetic to her message, and her claim that she was the Messiah.
[00:07:03] Not only did The Shakers face abuse and intimidation from members of the public, but Lee was physically attacked multiple times, and ended up dying from her injuries in 1784, at the age of 48.
[00:07:17] Now, moving on, we need to cross the Pacific for our next Messiah figure, and we also need to skip forward a few decades.
[00:07:27] Hong Xiuquan was a man born in 1814 to a poor farming family in Guangdong, in Southern China.
[00:07:35] He was very intelligent, and had grand ambitions of becoming a civil servant, a job which would have brought great honour not only to him but to his family.
[00:07:47] The problem was, becoming a bureaucrat was notoriously difficult.
[00:07:52] You needed to sit a government exam, and only around 1% of aspiring bureaucrats passed.
[00:08:00] Hong took the exam twice, but both times he failed.
[00:08:04] He tried again, and after the third time he was completely distraught, and had a nervous breakdown, which sent him into a mad, psychotic kind of state.
[00:08:15] When he finally recovered, he revealed that he had gone to heaven and discovered that he had an entirely different, heavenly family.
[00:08:24] His heavenly father told him that people on Earth were worshipping demons, not him, and Hong took this to mean that people were following the teachings of Confucius.
[00:08:37] This was in 1837, when Hong was 23.
[00:08:41] But he didn’t immediately pack everything in and decide that he was the Messiah.
[00:08:46] He actually took the civil service examinations one more time, six years later, but after failing again, he decided that the heavenly father he had seen six years prior was God, and the heavenly brother was Jesus Christ.
[00:09:02] In other words, Hong Xiuquan was the brother of Christ, and he was charged by his father, by God, with obliterating demon worship.
[00:09:14] Now, Hong was clearly a charismatic individual, handsome, eloquent and more than capable of attracting a crowd. He began preaching, he translated the Bible, and he developed his own twist on Christianity.
[00:09:29] He was initially thought of as something of a quack, an eccentric, by the authorities, but his message and his delivery were powerful enough to attract a significant following.
[00:09:42] By 1850 his followers had swelled to somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand, and he was deemed to be a threat.
[00:09:52] Government forces raided his headquarters, the settlement where he and his followers were living, but Hong fought back, defeating the government forces and even beheading the commander of the army.
[00:10:04] This was the start of a rebellion that would be called The Taiping Rebellion.
[00:10:09] It is such a good story that it certainly deserves its own full episode, but long story short, Hong came up against the full force of the Chinese government.
[00:10:20] This rebellion lasted for 14 years, resulted in anywhere from 20 to 30 million deaths, and was a large factor in the eventual decline of the Qing Dynasty.
[00:10:32] And in those 20 to 30 million deaths, as you might imagine, came Hong’s.
[00:10:39] Hong and his followers were under siege in the city of Tianjing, or modern day Nanjing.
[00:10:46] With government forces approaching and supplies running low, he had been forced to eat weeds, which most probably killed him, although some historians have suggested that he killed himself.
[00:10:59] In any case, he died, but the Chinese state wanted to punish him even in death, so his body was dug up from the grave, beheaded and burned, so that there was literally no trace of him for his followers to worship at.
[00:11:16] Now, our next messiah-like figure is also located in Asia, but this time we have to go a bit further north and east, to Korea.
[00:11:26] Our messiah-like figure here was called Sun Myung Moon, and he was born in 1920 in modern day North Korea, which was under Japanese rule at the time.
[00:11:37] His family converted to Christianity when Moon was still a boy, and on Easter Sunday 1936, when Moon was 16 years old, he claimed that he was visited by Jesus Christ.
[00:11:52] Jesus told Moon that Moon needed to continue the work that Jesus was unable to finish, because he was crucified.
[00:12:00] Jesus continued to come to Moon over a period of 9 years, revealing more about the mission that Moon was to be charged with. And in 1945, Moon published his manifesto, his beliefs one could say, in a text called “Divine Principle”.
[00:12:18] The added complication was that by 1945 Korea had been divided into two, North and South Korea, and by 1948 two completely separate countries had been formed.
[00:12:31] Moon was in what was then North Korea, and his religious teachings resulted in him being incarcerated in a labour camp. But in 1950 he was liberated by United Nations forces during the Korean war and he made his way to South Korea.
[00:12:49] It would be four years later, in 1954, that he founded his own religious movement, the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or the Unification Church, or informally “The Moonies”, after the name of its founder.
[00:13:06] Now, the Unification Church is still around today, and estimates for membership are anywhere from a few hundred thousand to over 10 million.
[00:13:16] It is perhaps most famous for its mass wedding ceremonies, where thousands of couples are either married or blessed at the same time.
[00:13:27] See, one of the core tenets of the church, and of Moon’s teaching, was that marriage and the creation of a holy family are a fundamental part of redemption.
[00:13:38] Jesus Christ was unable to get married, as his life was cut short, so this job was left to Moon and his wife, who were the so-called “True Parents”.
[00:13:50] And if you, like me, were a big fan of the Guinness Book of World Records, you might remember one record for the most people married at the same time. This was 35,000 couples, so 70,000 people, and this took place at one of these mass wedding ceremonies presided over by Moon.
[00:14:12] And unlike the previous two messiah-like figures, Moon went on to live a long and apparently happy life, dying in 2012 at the age of 92.
[00:14:24] Yes, as one might expect with the leader of what has been described as a cult by many, there were accusations of everything from sexual misconduct to tax evasion, but he was not beaten by an angry mob or his corpse dug up and beheaded like Ann Lee or Hong Xiuquan.
[00:14:42] Right, moving on to our last Messiah claimant, this is someone who is unusual because he is still alive, or at least was still alive at the time of making this episode.
[00:14:53] So, if you listen to this and think, hey, he does sound a bit like the Messiah, the good news is that he is still alive and well.
[00:15:01] The bad news is that he is being kept in a prison in Siberia, so you might rightly question whether he is well, or if he is indeed actually alive.
[00:15:12] His name is Sergei Anatolyevitch Torop, and he was born in 1961, in Krasnodar, in the Soviet Union, just north of the Black Sea.
[00:15:24] Just as the Soviet Union was about to have its big awakening, or at least big transformation from communism to capitalism, so was Torop.
[00:15:33] In 1990, when he was 29, he declared that he had a spiritual awakening, and that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
[00:15:44] He formed his own church a year later, in 1991, and rebranded himself as “Vissarion”, he who gives new life.
[00:15:54] He started to amass followers, who were attracted to his unique blend of the Russian Orthodox Church, Buddhism, with some collectivism and veganism thrown in for good measure.
[00:16:06] As a follower of Vissarion, you give up meat, smoking, swearing, alcohol, and money.
[00:16:13] Said like this it sounds somewhat harmless, and peaceful, but there are some signs that it is just as much about worshipping Vissarion himself as what he preaches.
[00:16:25] There is no Christmas, but you do celebrate Vissarion’s birthday, which comes on January 14th by the way.
[00:16:32] Vissarion also claims that the end of the world is coming, and that only his followers would be saved. He has been saying this since 1991 though, 30 years and counting, so there is probably not all that much to worry about on that count.
[00:16:50] And he also married a girl who has lived with him since she was seven years old, although he did at least have the decency to wait until she was 19 until the pair got married.
[00:17:02] In any case, the Russian state certainly isn’t a big fan, declaring him to be a cult leader and of having created, I quote, "a religious group whose activities may impose violence on citizens”.
[00:17:15] He was arrested in a raid on his compound in September of 2020, and has been held in a prison ever since.
[00:17:23] So, there you have it, a quick whistle stop tour through four very different people who have claimed to be the Messiah.
[00:17:32] We had Ann Lee, the lady from Manchester who claimed to be sent by God and instructed her followers to abstain from all sexual activities, as they were the root of all evil.
[00:17:44] We had Hong Xiuquan, the Chinese peasant who failed his civil service exams and decided to launch a full-scale rebellion against the Qing rulers instead of trying to pass on take number five.
[00:17:56] We had Sun Myung Moon, the Korean leader who claimed to be completing the work of Jesus Christ, conducting marriage ceremonies of literally tens of thousands of couples, and a man who sounds like he had very different views to Ann Lee when it came to sexual activity.
[00:18:14] And then we had Sergei Anatolyevitch Torop, or should I say Vissarion, the Russian vegan who abolished Christmas and replaced it with his own birthday.
[00:18:23] Were they really the messiah, or were they simply charismatic individuals who told a convincing tale to their gullible followers?
[00:18:31] Well, to millions of people in the case of Hong and Moon, and a few thousand in the case of Lee and Torop, yes, in fact, they most certainly were the messiah.
[00:18:42] But to everyone else, well, perhaps we can finish with the quote we started off: “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”.
[00:18:51] OK then, that is it for today's little exploration of four people who have claimed to be the messiah.
[00:18:58] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that it might have inspired you to learn more about all four of those individuals.
[00:19:06] We could have done standalone episodes on all four of them, so I hope you will forgive me if we glossed over some of the details.
[00:19:14] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:17] What other messiah-type figures have you heard about? How many of these four had you heard about before, and what do people think about them in your country?
[00:19:26] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:29] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:37] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Messiah, the promised one.
[00:00:26] But, don’t worry, this is not going to be a religious episode.
[00:00:31] In fact, we’re not really going to talk about the Messiah at all. Instead, we will explore the stories of various people throughout history who have claimed to be the messiah, anointed by God to save mankind.
[00:00:44] And as we’ll see, it doesn’t tend to end very well.
[00:00:49] Ok then, let’s get right into it.
[00:00:53] In the classic 1979 Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, there is a famous scene where the main character, Brian, is hiding in his house.
[00:01:05] Outside the window is a crowd chanting his name, saying “there he is, the chosen one has spoken”.
[00:01:15] Brian’s mother is furious, and she asks her son what on Earth is going on.
[00:01:22] She then sticks her head out of the window to the crowd chanting “messiah” and shouts “he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy. Now go away!”
[00:01:34] It is one of the classic lines in British comedy, and if you haven’t ever watched The Life of Brian, perhaps you should pause this episode right now and go and watch it, because it is just a brilliant film.
[00:01:48] Now, in the film the character Brian wasn’t the Messiah, he was a normal man who people had mistakenly identified as the messiah.
[00:01:59] But throughout history there are plenty of people who have claimed to actually have been the Messiah, to have been sent by some form of God to save mankind.
[00:02:11] Before we get into their individual stories, we should start with a brief definition of what “the messiah” means, as it might be slightly different to what you think.
[00:02:23] In most dictionaries you’ll find two definitions.
[00:02:28] One will be something like “Jesus Christ”, and the other will be something along the lines of “the promised and expected deliverer of the Jewish people”.
[00:02:39] And to remind you of an important distinction, Jesus was Jewish but he is not considered to be “The Messiah” in Judaism, although he is the Messiah in Christianity.
[00:02:52] Right, that is the first and last bit of theology we’ll cover in this episode, but the reason to mention it is to remind you that “the Messiah” does not always refer to Jesus.
[00:03:05] Much more interesting than a theological discussion, or at least much more weird and unusual, is to talk about some of the more controversial recent figures who have claimed that they are either a reincarnation of Jesus Christ himself, some kind of relation, or a general Messiah-type figure.
[00:03:26] This little Messiah expedition will take us from Manchester to the United States, China to Korea and even to Siberia.
[00:03:35] And it is full of eccentric characters.
[00:03:40] Our first messiah-like figure is slightly unusual in that it is a woman.
[00:03:47] For reasons that psychologists and sociologists would no doubt have plenty of explanations for, deciding that you are Christ reincarnated seems to be something that is more common in men than women.
[00:04:00] But a woman called Ann Lee was an exception to this rule.
[00:04:06] She was born in Manchester, in England, in 1736, and at the age of 22, she joined a Protestant Christian sect called the Shaking Quakers.
[00:04:19] The Shaking Quakers were similar to The Quakers, but they were called “Shaking” Quakers because they believed that you could purify yourself by doing a kind of shaking dance.
[00:04:34] One of their core beliefs was that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman.
[00:04:42] And this woman, they soon started to believe, was none other than Ann Lee.
[00:04:49] It seems that she started to believe this herself, as she started to preach that she had been sent by God, she was the Messiah.
[00:04:59] Her core belief, and the message that was most prominent in her teachings, was to abstain from, to not engage in, all forms of sexual relations.
[00:05:11] She believed that sexual contact was the original sin that Adam and Eve had committed, and by avoiding all forms of sex, one could attain salvation.
[00:05:23] Ann Lee had learned this the hard way, or at least she had come to this conclusion through personal experience.
[00:05:32] She had got married, and had fallen pregnant four times, but each one had resulted in a miscarriage, which one imagines would explain her view that sex was evil and sinful.
[00:05:45] As her followers grew, she found herself coming up against the law multiple times, and was arrested and sent to prison on numerous occasions.
[00:05:56] To try to escape what she saw as religious persecution, she set sail for the land of the free, America, basing herself in New York State and recruiting new members to her updated version of the “Shaking Quakers”, who were now simply called the “Shakers”.
[00:06:14] The group did grow, peaking at around 6,000 members, but it struggled to grow much past this.
[00:06:22] For a cult to grow its members need to multiply, to have children, but the problem was that sex was prohibited for the Shakers.
[00:06:32] Members had to adopt children, and the fact that you had to give up all sexual relations if you wanted to join the group, well, it can’t have been a huge attraction to potential new members.
[00:06:45] And Lee, like several of the other characters we’ll hear about today, found herself not only on the wrong side of the law but also coming up against some members of the public who were not so sympathetic to her message, and her claim that she was the Messiah.
[00:07:03] Not only did The Shakers face abuse and intimidation from members of the public, but Lee was physically attacked multiple times, and ended up dying from her injuries in 1784, at the age of 48.
[00:07:17] Now, moving on, we need to cross the Pacific for our next Messiah figure, and we also need to skip forward a few decades.
[00:07:27] Hong Xiuquan was a man born in 1814 to a poor farming family in Guangdong, in Southern China.
[00:07:35] He was very intelligent, and had grand ambitions of becoming a civil servant, a job which would have brought great honour not only to him but to his family.
[00:07:47] The problem was, becoming a bureaucrat was notoriously difficult.
[00:07:52] You needed to sit a government exam, and only around 1% of aspiring bureaucrats passed.
[00:08:00] Hong took the exam twice, but both times he failed.
[00:08:04] He tried again, and after the third time he was completely distraught, and had a nervous breakdown, which sent him into a mad, psychotic kind of state.
[00:08:15] When he finally recovered, he revealed that he had gone to heaven and discovered that he had an entirely different, heavenly family.
[00:08:24] His heavenly father told him that people on Earth were worshipping demons, not him, and Hong took this to mean that people were following the teachings of Confucius.
[00:08:37] This was in 1837, when Hong was 23.
[00:08:41] But he didn’t immediately pack everything in and decide that he was the Messiah.
[00:08:46] He actually took the civil service examinations one more time, six years later, but after failing again, he decided that the heavenly father he had seen six years prior was God, and the heavenly brother was Jesus Christ.
[00:09:02] In other words, Hong Xiuquan was the brother of Christ, and he was charged by his father, by God, with obliterating demon worship.
[00:09:14] Now, Hong was clearly a charismatic individual, handsome, eloquent and more than capable of attracting a crowd. He began preaching, he translated the Bible, and he developed his own twist on Christianity.
[00:09:29] He was initially thought of as something of a quack, an eccentric, by the authorities, but his message and his delivery were powerful enough to attract a significant following.
[00:09:42] By 1850 his followers had swelled to somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand, and he was deemed to be a threat.
[00:09:52] Government forces raided his headquarters, the settlement where he and his followers were living, but Hong fought back, defeating the government forces and even beheading the commander of the army.
[00:10:04] This was the start of a rebellion that would be called The Taiping Rebellion.
[00:10:09] It is such a good story that it certainly deserves its own full episode, but long story short, Hong came up against the full force of the Chinese government.
[00:10:20] This rebellion lasted for 14 years, resulted in anywhere from 20 to 30 million deaths, and was a large factor in the eventual decline of the Qing Dynasty.
[00:10:32] And in those 20 to 30 million deaths, as you might imagine, came Hong’s.
[00:10:39] Hong and his followers were under siege in the city of Tianjing, or modern day Nanjing.
[00:10:46] With government forces approaching and supplies running low, he had been forced to eat weeds, which most probably killed him, although some historians have suggested that he killed himself.
[00:10:59] In any case, he died, but the Chinese state wanted to punish him even in death, so his body was dug up from the grave, beheaded and burned, so that there was literally no trace of him for his followers to worship at.
[00:11:16] Now, our next messiah-like figure is also located in Asia, but this time we have to go a bit further north and east, to Korea.
[00:11:26] Our messiah-like figure here was called Sun Myung Moon, and he was born in 1920 in modern day North Korea, which was under Japanese rule at the time.
[00:11:37] His family converted to Christianity when Moon was still a boy, and on Easter Sunday 1936, when Moon was 16 years old, he claimed that he was visited by Jesus Christ.
[00:11:52] Jesus told Moon that Moon needed to continue the work that Jesus was unable to finish, because he was crucified.
[00:12:00] Jesus continued to come to Moon over a period of 9 years, revealing more about the mission that Moon was to be charged with. And in 1945, Moon published his manifesto, his beliefs one could say, in a text called “Divine Principle”.
[00:12:18] The added complication was that by 1945 Korea had been divided into two, North and South Korea, and by 1948 two completely separate countries had been formed.
[00:12:31] Moon was in what was then North Korea, and his religious teachings resulted in him being incarcerated in a labour camp. But in 1950 he was liberated by United Nations forces during the Korean war and he made his way to South Korea.
[00:12:49] It would be four years later, in 1954, that he founded his own religious movement, the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or the Unification Church, or informally “The Moonies”, after the name of its founder.
[00:13:06] Now, the Unification Church is still around today, and estimates for membership are anywhere from a few hundred thousand to over 10 million.
[00:13:16] It is perhaps most famous for its mass wedding ceremonies, where thousands of couples are either married or blessed at the same time.
[00:13:27] See, one of the core tenets of the church, and of Moon’s teaching, was that marriage and the creation of a holy family are a fundamental part of redemption.
[00:13:38] Jesus Christ was unable to get married, as his life was cut short, so this job was left to Moon and his wife, who were the so-called “True Parents”.
[00:13:50] And if you, like me, were a big fan of the Guinness Book of World Records, you might remember one record for the most people married at the same time. This was 35,000 couples, so 70,000 people, and this took place at one of these mass wedding ceremonies presided over by Moon.
[00:14:12] And unlike the previous two messiah-like figures, Moon went on to live a long and apparently happy life, dying in 2012 at the age of 92.
[00:14:24] Yes, as one might expect with the leader of what has been described as a cult by many, there were accusations of everything from sexual misconduct to tax evasion, but he was not beaten by an angry mob or his corpse dug up and beheaded like Ann Lee or Hong Xiuquan.
[00:14:42] Right, moving on to our last Messiah claimant, this is someone who is unusual because he is still alive, or at least was still alive at the time of making this episode.
[00:14:53] So, if you listen to this and think, hey, he does sound a bit like the Messiah, the good news is that he is still alive and well.
[00:15:01] The bad news is that he is being kept in a prison in Siberia, so you might rightly question whether he is well, or if he is indeed actually alive.
[00:15:12] His name is Sergei Anatolyevitch Torop, and he was born in 1961, in Krasnodar, in the Soviet Union, just north of the Black Sea.
[00:15:24] Just as the Soviet Union was about to have its big awakening, or at least big transformation from communism to capitalism, so was Torop.
[00:15:33] In 1990, when he was 29, he declared that he had a spiritual awakening, and that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
[00:15:44] He formed his own church a year later, in 1991, and rebranded himself as “Vissarion”, he who gives new life.
[00:15:54] He started to amass followers, who were attracted to his unique blend of the Russian Orthodox Church, Buddhism, with some collectivism and veganism thrown in for good measure.
[00:16:06] As a follower of Vissarion, you give up meat, smoking, swearing, alcohol, and money.
[00:16:13] Said like this it sounds somewhat harmless, and peaceful, but there are some signs that it is just as much about worshipping Vissarion himself as what he preaches.
[00:16:25] There is no Christmas, but you do celebrate Vissarion’s birthday, which comes on January 14th by the way.
[00:16:32] Vissarion also claims that the end of the world is coming, and that only his followers would be saved. He has been saying this since 1991 though, 30 years and counting, so there is probably not all that much to worry about on that count.
[00:16:50] And he also married a girl who has lived with him since she was seven years old, although he did at least have the decency to wait until she was 19 until the pair got married.
[00:17:02] In any case, the Russian state certainly isn’t a big fan, declaring him to be a cult leader and of having created, I quote, "a religious group whose activities may impose violence on citizens”.
[00:17:15] He was arrested in a raid on his compound in September of 2020, and has been held in a prison ever since.
[00:17:23] So, there you have it, a quick whistle stop tour through four very different people who have claimed to be the Messiah.
[00:17:32] We had Ann Lee, the lady from Manchester who claimed to be sent by God and instructed her followers to abstain from all sexual activities, as they were the root of all evil.
[00:17:44] We had Hong Xiuquan, the Chinese peasant who failed his civil service exams and decided to launch a full-scale rebellion against the Qing rulers instead of trying to pass on take number five.
[00:17:56] We had Sun Myung Moon, the Korean leader who claimed to be completing the work of Jesus Christ, conducting marriage ceremonies of literally tens of thousands of couples, and a man who sounds like he had very different views to Ann Lee when it came to sexual activity.
[00:18:14] And then we had Sergei Anatolyevitch Torop, or should I say Vissarion, the Russian vegan who abolished Christmas and replaced it with his own birthday.
[00:18:23] Were they really the messiah, or were they simply charismatic individuals who told a convincing tale to their gullible followers?
[00:18:31] Well, to millions of people in the case of Hong and Moon, and a few thousand in the case of Lee and Torop, yes, in fact, they most certainly were the messiah.
[00:18:42] But to everyone else, well, perhaps we can finish with the quote we started off: “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”.
[00:18:51] OK then, that is it for today's little exploration of four people who have claimed to be the messiah.
[00:18:58] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that it might have inspired you to learn more about all four of those individuals.
[00:19:06] We could have done standalone episodes on all four of them, so I hope you will forgive me if we glossed over some of the details.
[00:19:14] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:17] What other messiah-type figures have you heard about? How many of these four had you heard about before, and what do people think about them in your country?
[00:19:26] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:29] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:37] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Messiah, the promised one.
[00:00:26] But, don’t worry, this is not going to be a religious episode.
[00:00:31] In fact, we’re not really going to talk about the Messiah at all. Instead, we will explore the stories of various people throughout history who have claimed to be the messiah, anointed by God to save mankind.
[00:00:44] And as we’ll see, it doesn’t tend to end very well.
[00:00:49] Ok then, let’s get right into it.
[00:00:53] In the classic 1979 Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, there is a famous scene where the main character, Brian, is hiding in his house.
[00:01:05] Outside the window is a crowd chanting his name, saying “there he is, the chosen one has spoken”.
[00:01:15] Brian’s mother is furious, and she asks her son what on Earth is going on.
[00:01:22] She then sticks her head out of the window to the crowd chanting “messiah” and shouts “he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy. Now go away!”
[00:01:34] It is one of the classic lines in British comedy, and if you haven’t ever watched The Life of Brian, perhaps you should pause this episode right now and go and watch it, because it is just a brilliant film.
[00:01:48] Now, in the film the character Brian wasn’t the Messiah, he was a normal man who people had mistakenly identified as the messiah.
[00:01:59] But throughout history there are plenty of people who have claimed to actually have been the Messiah, to have been sent by some form of God to save mankind.
[00:02:11] Before we get into their individual stories, we should start with a brief definition of what “the messiah” means, as it might be slightly different to what you think.
[00:02:23] In most dictionaries you’ll find two definitions.
[00:02:28] One will be something like “Jesus Christ”, and the other will be something along the lines of “the promised and expected deliverer of the Jewish people”.
[00:02:39] And to remind you of an important distinction, Jesus was Jewish but he is not considered to be “The Messiah” in Judaism, although he is the Messiah in Christianity.
[00:02:52] Right, that is the first and last bit of theology we’ll cover in this episode, but the reason to mention it is to remind you that “the Messiah” does not always refer to Jesus.
[00:03:05] Much more interesting than a theological discussion, or at least much more weird and unusual, is to talk about some of the more controversial recent figures who have claimed that they are either a reincarnation of Jesus Christ himself, some kind of relation, or a general Messiah-type figure.
[00:03:26] This little Messiah expedition will take us from Manchester to the United States, China to Korea and even to Siberia.
[00:03:35] And it is full of eccentric characters.
[00:03:40] Our first messiah-like figure is slightly unusual in that it is a woman.
[00:03:47] For reasons that psychologists and sociologists would no doubt have plenty of explanations for, deciding that you are Christ reincarnated seems to be something that is more common in men than women.
[00:04:00] But a woman called Ann Lee was an exception to this rule.
[00:04:06] She was born in Manchester, in England, in 1736, and at the age of 22, she joined a Protestant Christian sect called the Shaking Quakers.
[00:04:19] The Shaking Quakers were similar to The Quakers, but they were called “Shaking” Quakers because they believed that you could purify yourself by doing a kind of shaking dance.
[00:04:34] One of their core beliefs was that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman.
[00:04:42] And this woman, they soon started to believe, was none other than Ann Lee.
[00:04:49] It seems that she started to believe this herself, as she started to preach that she had been sent by God, she was the Messiah.
[00:04:59] Her core belief, and the message that was most prominent in her teachings, was to abstain from, to not engage in, all forms of sexual relations.
[00:05:11] She believed that sexual contact was the original sin that Adam and Eve had committed, and by avoiding all forms of sex, one could attain salvation.
[00:05:23] Ann Lee had learned this the hard way, or at least she had come to this conclusion through personal experience.
[00:05:32] She had got married, and had fallen pregnant four times, but each one had resulted in a miscarriage, which one imagines would explain her view that sex was evil and sinful.
[00:05:45] As her followers grew, she found herself coming up against the law multiple times, and was arrested and sent to prison on numerous occasions.
[00:05:56] To try to escape what she saw as religious persecution, she set sail for the land of the free, America, basing herself in New York State and recruiting new members to her updated version of the “Shaking Quakers”, who were now simply called the “Shakers”.
[00:06:14] The group did grow, peaking at around 6,000 members, but it struggled to grow much past this.
[00:06:22] For a cult to grow its members need to multiply, to have children, but the problem was that sex was prohibited for the Shakers.
[00:06:32] Members had to adopt children, and the fact that you had to give up all sexual relations if you wanted to join the group, well, it can’t have been a huge attraction to potential new members.
[00:06:45] And Lee, like several of the other characters we’ll hear about today, found herself not only on the wrong side of the law but also coming up against some members of the public who were not so sympathetic to her message, and her claim that she was the Messiah.
[00:07:03] Not only did The Shakers face abuse and intimidation from members of the public, but Lee was physically attacked multiple times, and ended up dying from her injuries in 1784, at the age of 48.
[00:07:17] Now, moving on, we need to cross the Pacific for our next Messiah figure, and we also need to skip forward a few decades.
[00:07:27] Hong Xiuquan was a man born in 1814 to a poor farming family in Guangdong, in Southern China.
[00:07:35] He was very intelligent, and had grand ambitions of becoming a civil servant, a job which would have brought great honour not only to him but to his family.
[00:07:47] The problem was, becoming a bureaucrat was notoriously difficult.
[00:07:52] You needed to sit a government exam, and only around 1% of aspiring bureaucrats passed.
[00:08:00] Hong took the exam twice, but both times he failed.
[00:08:04] He tried again, and after the third time he was completely distraught, and had a nervous breakdown, which sent him into a mad, psychotic kind of state.
[00:08:15] When he finally recovered, he revealed that he had gone to heaven and discovered that he had an entirely different, heavenly family.
[00:08:24] His heavenly father told him that people on Earth were worshipping demons, not him, and Hong took this to mean that people were following the teachings of Confucius.
[00:08:37] This was in 1837, when Hong was 23.
[00:08:41] But he didn’t immediately pack everything in and decide that he was the Messiah.
[00:08:46] He actually took the civil service examinations one more time, six years later, but after failing again, he decided that the heavenly father he had seen six years prior was God, and the heavenly brother was Jesus Christ.
[00:09:02] In other words, Hong Xiuquan was the brother of Christ, and he was charged by his father, by God, with obliterating demon worship.
[00:09:14] Now, Hong was clearly a charismatic individual, handsome, eloquent and more than capable of attracting a crowd. He began preaching, he translated the Bible, and he developed his own twist on Christianity.
[00:09:29] He was initially thought of as something of a quack, an eccentric, by the authorities, but his message and his delivery were powerful enough to attract a significant following.
[00:09:42] By 1850 his followers had swelled to somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand, and he was deemed to be a threat.
[00:09:52] Government forces raided his headquarters, the settlement where he and his followers were living, but Hong fought back, defeating the government forces and even beheading the commander of the army.
[00:10:04] This was the start of a rebellion that would be called The Taiping Rebellion.
[00:10:09] It is such a good story that it certainly deserves its own full episode, but long story short, Hong came up against the full force of the Chinese government.
[00:10:20] This rebellion lasted for 14 years, resulted in anywhere from 20 to 30 million deaths, and was a large factor in the eventual decline of the Qing Dynasty.
[00:10:32] And in those 20 to 30 million deaths, as you might imagine, came Hong’s.
[00:10:39] Hong and his followers were under siege in the city of Tianjing, or modern day Nanjing.
[00:10:46] With government forces approaching and supplies running low, he had been forced to eat weeds, which most probably killed him, although some historians have suggested that he killed himself.
[00:10:59] In any case, he died, but the Chinese state wanted to punish him even in death, so his body was dug up from the grave, beheaded and burned, so that there was literally no trace of him for his followers to worship at.
[00:11:16] Now, our next messiah-like figure is also located in Asia, but this time we have to go a bit further north and east, to Korea.
[00:11:26] Our messiah-like figure here was called Sun Myung Moon, and he was born in 1920 in modern day North Korea, which was under Japanese rule at the time.
[00:11:37] His family converted to Christianity when Moon was still a boy, and on Easter Sunday 1936, when Moon was 16 years old, he claimed that he was visited by Jesus Christ.
[00:11:52] Jesus told Moon that Moon needed to continue the work that Jesus was unable to finish, because he was crucified.
[00:12:00] Jesus continued to come to Moon over a period of 9 years, revealing more about the mission that Moon was to be charged with. And in 1945, Moon published his manifesto, his beliefs one could say, in a text called “Divine Principle”.
[00:12:18] The added complication was that by 1945 Korea had been divided into two, North and South Korea, and by 1948 two completely separate countries had been formed.
[00:12:31] Moon was in what was then North Korea, and his religious teachings resulted in him being incarcerated in a labour camp. But in 1950 he was liberated by United Nations forces during the Korean war and he made his way to South Korea.
[00:12:49] It would be four years later, in 1954, that he founded his own religious movement, the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or the Unification Church, or informally “The Moonies”, after the name of its founder.
[00:13:06] Now, the Unification Church is still around today, and estimates for membership are anywhere from a few hundred thousand to over 10 million.
[00:13:16] It is perhaps most famous for its mass wedding ceremonies, where thousands of couples are either married or blessed at the same time.
[00:13:27] See, one of the core tenets of the church, and of Moon’s teaching, was that marriage and the creation of a holy family are a fundamental part of redemption.
[00:13:38] Jesus Christ was unable to get married, as his life was cut short, so this job was left to Moon and his wife, who were the so-called “True Parents”.
[00:13:50] And if you, like me, were a big fan of the Guinness Book of World Records, you might remember one record for the most people married at the same time. This was 35,000 couples, so 70,000 people, and this took place at one of these mass wedding ceremonies presided over by Moon.
[00:14:12] And unlike the previous two messiah-like figures, Moon went on to live a long and apparently happy life, dying in 2012 at the age of 92.
[00:14:24] Yes, as one might expect with the leader of what has been described as a cult by many, there were accusations of everything from sexual misconduct to tax evasion, but he was not beaten by an angry mob or his corpse dug up and beheaded like Ann Lee or Hong Xiuquan.
[00:14:42] Right, moving on to our last Messiah claimant, this is someone who is unusual because he is still alive, or at least was still alive at the time of making this episode.
[00:14:53] So, if you listen to this and think, hey, he does sound a bit like the Messiah, the good news is that he is still alive and well.
[00:15:01] The bad news is that he is being kept in a prison in Siberia, so you might rightly question whether he is well, or if he is indeed actually alive.
[00:15:12] His name is Sergei Anatolyevitch Torop, and he was born in 1961, in Krasnodar, in the Soviet Union, just north of the Black Sea.
[00:15:24] Just as the Soviet Union was about to have its big awakening, or at least big transformation from communism to capitalism, so was Torop.
[00:15:33] In 1990, when he was 29, he declared that he had a spiritual awakening, and that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
[00:15:44] He formed his own church a year later, in 1991, and rebranded himself as “Vissarion”, he who gives new life.
[00:15:54] He started to amass followers, who were attracted to his unique blend of the Russian Orthodox Church, Buddhism, with some collectivism and veganism thrown in for good measure.
[00:16:06] As a follower of Vissarion, you give up meat, smoking, swearing, alcohol, and money.
[00:16:13] Said like this it sounds somewhat harmless, and peaceful, but there are some signs that it is just as much about worshipping Vissarion himself as what he preaches.
[00:16:25] There is no Christmas, but you do celebrate Vissarion’s birthday, which comes on January 14th by the way.
[00:16:32] Vissarion also claims that the end of the world is coming, and that only his followers would be saved. He has been saying this since 1991 though, 30 years and counting, so there is probably not all that much to worry about on that count.
[00:16:50] And he also married a girl who has lived with him since she was seven years old, although he did at least have the decency to wait until she was 19 until the pair got married.
[00:17:02] In any case, the Russian state certainly isn’t a big fan, declaring him to be a cult leader and of having created, I quote, "a religious group whose activities may impose violence on citizens”.
[00:17:15] He was arrested in a raid on his compound in September of 2020, and has been held in a prison ever since.
[00:17:23] So, there you have it, a quick whistle stop tour through four very different people who have claimed to be the Messiah.
[00:17:32] We had Ann Lee, the lady from Manchester who claimed to be sent by God and instructed her followers to abstain from all sexual activities, as they were the root of all evil.
[00:17:44] We had Hong Xiuquan, the Chinese peasant who failed his civil service exams and decided to launch a full-scale rebellion against the Qing rulers instead of trying to pass on take number five.
[00:17:56] We had Sun Myung Moon, the Korean leader who claimed to be completing the work of Jesus Christ, conducting marriage ceremonies of literally tens of thousands of couples, and a man who sounds like he had very different views to Ann Lee when it came to sexual activity.
[00:18:14] And then we had Sergei Anatolyevitch Torop, or should I say Vissarion, the Russian vegan who abolished Christmas and replaced it with his own birthday.
[00:18:23] Were they really the messiah, or were they simply charismatic individuals who told a convincing tale to their gullible followers?
[00:18:31] Well, to millions of people in the case of Hong and Moon, and a few thousand in the case of Lee and Torop, yes, in fact, they most certainly were the messiah.
[00:18:42] But to everyone else, well, perhaps we can finish with the quote we started off: “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”.
[00:18:51] OK then, that is it for today's little exploration of four people who have claimed to be the messiah.
[00:18:58] I hope it's been an interesting one, that you've learnt something new, and that it might have inspired you to learn more about all four of those individuals.
[00:19:06] We could have done standalone episodes on all four of them, so I hope you will forgive me if we glossed over some of the details.
[00:19:14] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:17] What other messiah-type figures have you heard about? How many of these four had you heard about before, and what do people think about them in your country?
[00:19:26] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:29] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:37] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
