THE REAL MESSIAH The throne of St. Mark and the true origins of Christianity

Written by Stephan Huller

Monday, 01 June 2009 00:00

by Stephan Huller

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It is really hard to know when inspiration is going to hit you. It came to me when I was on a vacation. It seemed I had been walking around Venice forever. I was starting to complain saying I wanted to take a break and sit down. At that very moment my wife made a joke and said ‘there’s a chair over there!’ she exclaimed. And then I saw it, and my life was forever changed.

For almost a thousand years a remarkable object - the throne of St. Mark - has been openly displayed in the treasury of the Basilica di San Marco. It has been seen by hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. It has been the subject of about a half dozen or so academic papers. Yet few people have ever been able to make much sense of this fascinating miniature alabaster chair.

Most of what we know about the relic comes from ancient legends. In the ninth century a company of Italian sailors plundered an ancient church devoted to St. Mark on the beaches of Alexandria. Mark came to Egypt shortly after he witnessed Jesus’ crucifixion. All our ancient sources emphasize that he wanted to build a shrine in this, the ancient Jewish distinct of Alexandria, in order to found a community of God.

The details of this trip doesn’t get much attention among people in the West. We have learned to believe that Christianity was meant to headquartered in Rome. Nevertheless a strong case can be made that the Roman Papacy actually borrowed (or stole) its tradition from that which Mark founded in Alexandria. It’s just no one will listen to that argument because the present day Coptic faith is so numerically

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insignificant.

Tradition again says that when Mark came to establish his shrine leading members of the Alexandrian Jewish community were there to welcome him, including his famous uncle, the Jewish philosopher Philo. At some point after the dinner the participants gathered in a cave and sang hymns while an eight year old little Mark sat upon a miniature throne. It was from this cave and from this throne that the line of Coptic Popes was established up until the day the throne was stolen and taken to Venice.

When I first laid my eyes on this strange object all of these legendary stories immediately came into my mind. I was quite certain that the throne on display in Venice was one and the same with legendary object mentioned in Alexandrian tradition. Nevertheless I wasn’t satisfied with ‘just having a hunch.‘ I set out to prove it.

Over the next few years I took little steps towards proving my hypothesis. I wrote a paper which explained the iconography on the throne. I wrote another which identified the throne as the Episcopal chair used to ordain Coptic Popes. In due course I submitted these papers for publication in two well regarded academic journals - the Harvard Theological Review and the Journal of Coptic Studies. Yet the mystery of the throne of St. Mark still kept me up at night.

I knew I hadn’t adequately explained the function of this most unusual of Biblical curiosities nor had I succeeded in supplementing many of the legendary aspects of the narrative with real hard historical facts. Yet the more I studied the throne the more I found myself drifting outside of the normal limits of academic inquiry. There were a number clues to the real historical identity of this elusive figure of St. Mark from the carvings on the surface of the chair. Yet they revealed themselves to me in the most unorthodox fashion - an inscription with cryptic mirror writing, gematria and symbolic representation based on Jewish mysticism and kabbalah.

In order to truly get anyone to take the testimony of the throne of St. Mark seriously I would first have to figure out who Mark really was. I spent years investigating the throne and eventually developed many of my theories into a book which has just been released by Watkins Publishing called the Real Messiah. The starting point of my investigation was the cryptic inscription chiseled with an ancient form of Hebrew mirror writing onto the front of the seat portion of the throne. It is the same cipher which appears in the documents discovered in the caves of Qumran.

When I sent PDF files of the inscription to a number of experts on the Hebrew language they noted that there could be no mistaking that it developed in two different stages. The experts I consulted told me that the more recent mirror letters could be dated no later than the second century. Yet there was an older more interesting part of the inscription which came from a period much earlier than that - perhaps as early as the time of Jesus. I was told that the four characters to the left most part of the inscription originally stood alone and represented a kind of script used only by the ancient Samaritan sect in Israel.

I was particularly intrigued by this discovery as I knew that most of the early heretics in Christianity were converts from this community. Simon Magus was a Samaritan as were most of his followers. Alexandria happened to represent both the largest Samaritan community outside of Palestine and was the virtual Mecca of gnostic culture. Little by little all the separate lines of inquiry I was developing were coming together.

Indeed the more I looked at the throne the more I saw that it testified to the true beginnings of Christianity. The chair I saw in Venice wasn’t just another ancient Christian reliquary. It was a gnostic throne which was older than documents discovered at Nag Hammadi. Indeed it was undoubtedly the earliest surviving Christian relic.

My team and I proceeded to transcribe the Samaritan letters in the cryptic inscription and we were surprised to learn that they pointed to yet another code in the image on the chair’s backrest. We were all quite stunned. The object was in the words of Winston Churchill “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Indeed the depiction on the backrest was fairly straightforward. A ram was depicted caught in the branches of the Tree of Life which stood in Eden, the source of the four rivers of Paradise.

Everyone recognized that the image was messianic, but where was the ‘secret code’?

I took it upon myself to solve this mystery. I spent hours trying to find anything resembling a hidden inscription buried in these carvings, yet I quickly realized there was nothing like that here. I tried all sorts of tricks, even spending long hours gazing at the image upside down, with no breakthrough forthcoming. It was only when I began to pay attention to the obvious asymmetry in the way the tree was represented that it all came together for me.

In the end I uncovered an even more mysterious code embedded in the thirty five fruit hanging from five principles branches of the main trunk of the tree. Going left to right there were eight fruit on the first branch and seven, six, five and nine fruit on the respective branches which followed. I knew from my own background that Jews often used groups of numbered things to spell out hidden words and phrases. In Hebrew letters were numbers and I had personally seen old men in synagogues spell out divine words with knotted tassels in Jewish prayer shawls.

So it was when I transposed the numbers of fruit on the tree to their equivalent letter in the Hebrew alphabet I discovered something utterly amazing - a reference to an Old Testament prophesy which proved that St. Mark rather than Jesus was the Real Messiah. Indeed when all the other codes on the surface of the throne were deciphered it became clear that something else about St. Mark was also revealed - he was Marcus Julius Agrippa, the last king of the Jews.

It is difficult to quantify how significant the rediscovery of the ancient Christian relic is. As I understand it, the throne is nothing short of a Rosetta Stone filling in the gaps in our historical knowledge and helping us develop a history of earliest Christianity. What is recognized now with this throne is that the gnostics were indeed right. There was indeed a secret and ultimately cryptic message within Christianity which had been buried by centuries of persecutions. Now at last with the Real Messiah those original messianic truths are about to speak for themselves.

“intriguing and controversial” - Publishers Weekly

“brilliantly executed” Robert Eisenman,

“intensive and commendable.” James H. Charlesworth, Editor of Princeton’s Dead Sea Scroll Project

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mark%27s_Basilica

Bio:

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Of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world. "I grew up thinking that I was the last of the mohicans," he muses. "All of this might sound kind of dramatic, yet that's just the way I was raised. It was that kind of thinking that inspired the research behind this book." Stephan has literally spent two decades piecing together the origins of his tradition's fusion of the New and Old Testaments with a unique Jewish slant. His book The Real Messiah is scheduled to be released by Duncan Baird Publishing in the UK and Sterling Books in the US.

Last Updated ( Sunday, 31 May 2009 15:06 )