On Discovering 'the Ninth Vision' on the Backrest of the Throne of St. Mark

I've started to tell my readership that the throne is a gnostic artifact.  Yes, I think that the Patriarch of Alexandria used to sit on the throne.  But I also think that there were rituals where the throne was left vacant.  I always thought something was strange about the asymmetry in the arrangement of the leaves.  I started wondering if the fruit were arranged in groups to symbolize letters of the alphabet.  This is done a lot in Sephardic Jewish communities (i.e. those who never left the Middle East and north Africa).

The prayer shawls of men in these communities will have their knots tied up to spell the divine name (i.e. ten knots, five knots, six knots, five knots) or other important words or sayings.

When I translated the arrangement of fruit into Aramaic letters I got the word "the ninth vision" or h.ezwa tish'ana חזוה תשענה חזוה תשענה

Here's another way to look at my 'discovery; of the word 'the vision' - i.e. cH (8th letter) tZ (7th letter) V (6 letter) eH (5th letter) reading right to left in Samaritan Aramaic from the number of fruit or leaves on each of the five main branches of the myrtle tree. Perhaps it was never intended by the original design but 'discovered' by the author of the book of Revelations. It would strongly suggest that he thought that the throne was composed 'in Samaritan characters.' Maybe he ignored the problem of the nine other fruit or leaves that are left over. His 'inspiration' told him that what was being depicted on the throne wasn't a memorial but a 'revelation' or 'vision.'

The book of Revelations was taken over by the Catholic Church despite its suspect status because it went beyond the historical meaning of the chair. In a way it was a precursor to Irenaeus' interpretation of the four living creatures as evangelists. The chair still has an exalted status. The later tradition does its best to divorce itself from the original association as A STATEMENT ABOUT MARK'S SUPERIOR STATUS.

When I spoke with a colleague at Columbia about the expression he unhesitatingly pointed me to the ninth vision of Zechariah which identifies the messiah as sitting on the divine throne. The counting of nine visions in Zechariah was established in Alexandria and recently been demonstrated by Marie-Joseph Lagrange.

The vision that is seen is the messianic king enthroned and ruling with the High Priest. In the Alexandrian text of Zechariah the priest’s name is Jesus while the messianic king is only identified as the Dawn [anatole]. The text begins by telling of the historical 'crowning' of both Jesus and immediately goes on to announce the royal messiah who would follow him:

Behold the man whose name is Dawn; over the horizon he will dawn [anatelei], and build the house of the Lord. And he will take on nobility [or prowess: Greek aretê], and sit and rule upon his throne; and there will be a Priest on his right hand, and there shall be concord between them

It was immediately clear that the throne was testifying to the fact that the Papal line of succession from St. Mark in Alexandria was the fulfillment of this Jewish messianic expectation.