Being 'the Agrippa guy'

For better or worse I have become 'the Agrippa guy.' You know the guy who believes that Marcus Julius Agrippa was St. Mark. It's like I have to justify my 'belief' in this phenomena.

The facts are that Jews of all ages believed and still believe that Agrippa was the messiah of Daniel 9:26. In fact - as I note again in the Real Messiah (I don't normally do this kind of plug at this site but I have to now) - all the early Alexandrian Church Fathers had the same interpretation.

How do these nitwits who ridicule my theory explain this shared interest in Agrippa the messiah? How do they explain that it was only at the time of Luther that Christianity actually argued that Jesus was the messiah of Daniel?

The point is that I get tired of fighting these idiots - idiots who believe that someone like Jesus could possibly have been the messiah envisioned by generations of MY ANCESTORS (the Jews).

There isn’t a Jew alive, dead or suspended in limbo who would accept Jesus as a viable messianic candidate (unless you cite those Jews for Jesus who have the same rank as Bernie Madoff in our community). The formulation that Jesus came to announce someone else is shared by almost two billion Muslims. So I am hardly alone in thinking ‘outside’ the box that Christians of European descent set up for people to get trapped in.

All that I am guilt of is trying to make sense of why Marcionites, Manichaeans and other Middle Eastern forms of Christianity (the Marcionites were especially popular in Syria) identified Jesus as Chrestos rather than Christos (most other people in these blogs just assume the ‘heresies’ were accursed by God and move on.

My solution was that that use of Chrestos was not a corruption of Christos but was in fact the original title of Jesus. As I have argued on my blog it went back to a rival conception of Jesus that he only represented God (Chrestos = yashar in the LXX Psalm 2:21 and yashar is frequently used for a homiletic explanation of the name Israel).

In case many aren't aware Israel was also the angel of the presence, the ‘glory Lord’ of the existing NT.

Consider the use of Justin and many of the other earliest Church Fathers in the scripture ‘the Lord and his messiah’ (Isa 45:1, Psalm 20:6, Psalm 28:8 etc).

There is nothing more in keeping with the ORIGINAL Judeo-Christian tradition than dividing the messiah from his Lord. That Christians who orient their faith in the direction of Europe rather than the Middle East do not accept this only testifies to the dullness of their ancestor’s intellects.

I do not subscribe to the typically Protestant interest in ‘Jesus the man’ (Jim West accused me of being of the historical Jesus crowd which I am certainly not). Instead I follow the early Alexandrian assumptions that he was God – and specifically the angel of the presence or the ‘column of glory’ which accompanied Moses and the people in the wilderness (which explains why Paul speaks of ‘Chrestos being the rock’ – the idea that the messiah was at the Exodus makes utterly no sense).

So again, to blunt all this criticism that you and others inevitably throw up at anyone who disagrees with the whole ‘Jesus Christ’ formulation.

Indeed let’s go back to the very beginning:

IC XC.

Irenaeus and the rest of these trained monkeys read 'Christos' for XC. Marcion and I read Chrestos. I happen to think that Marcion and I are ultimately correct (given the fact that the XC symbol was originally used long before Christianity as a symbol used by scribal copyists to denote that a certain section of text was ‘good’ or ‘correct’). Thus the specific inference that XC meant Christos was secondary (no Marcionite would have a problem with this assumption only members of the Catholic heresy).


As a working hypothesis then I do not believe that Jesus ever claimed the be the messiah. I do not think he was like Moses or David. I think instead the gospel was written in such a way that it used Jesus to announce the one who was to come – call that a ’second coming’ or whatever you will – that’s what I believe.

I don’t think that identifying Jesus as God and someone else as the messiah slights Jesus in anyway. God is better than the messiah. It’s like comparing the coach of a football (soccer) team and a star striker.

The coach is certainly the more valuable.