Of all the items taken from Egypt by far the most intriguing ancient relic is the throne of St. Mark. It was on this cathedra, who dimensions conform almost exactly to a modern salon chair, that the ancient Patriarchs of Alexandria used to be enthroned as Pope and Patriatch of the Great City of Alexandria ...'Thirteenth of the Apostles and Judge of the Ecumene' (= 'inhabitable world').
The Alexandrian tradition has always believed that Mark came to Alexandria by boat from Rome and among his final acts in the city established a throne in side of a church he supposedly build "in a place called the Cattle-pasture [Ta Boukolou], near the sea, beside a rock from which stone is hewn." [Severus al'Ashmunein History of the Patriarchs I.1]
Our earliest Coptic sources make absolutely clear how fanatically devoted they were to the throne of St. Mark. This was the furthest thing from some inanimate object which was merely used for ceremonial purposes. Following the beliefs of pagan Egyptians dating back to the time of the Pharaohs the throne is identified with a supernatural female goddess figure.
Her husband Osiris dies and is reborn in the hereafter just before the birth of her son Horus who becomes the symbol of all Pharaohs who are seated on her throne.
The Pharaoh as Horus in life became the Pharaoh as Osiris in death, where he was united with the rest of the gods. New incarnations of Horus succeeded the deceased pharaoh on earth in the form of new pharaohs. By identifying the Pharaoh with Horus, the Pharaoh theologically had dominion over all the world.
As the religion of Christianity was introduced to the native population of Egypt it was conveyed to them in familiar images. The throne is identified in the earliest Coptic texts as the Virgin Mary. After Jesus died, St. Mark (whose mother was also named Mary) is seated on the throne and initiates a line of rulers of the world - the Patriarchs of Alexandria - who are believed to partake in the soul of Christ through their communion with St. Mark.
These ideas may seem strange to most Christian believers but they have been well known to scholars studying the tradition. The throne of St. Mark was understood to have supernatural powers. Ancient witnesses always report seeing or hearing Christ presence on the seat of the throne. The implication clearly was that as each Patriarch seated himself on the throne he and the person of Christ became one.
There are stories from the fourth century of a new Patriarch who saw Jesus on the throne and felt it would be disrespectful to seat his bottom on the site of the Epiphany. The native patrons of St. Mark church demanded that he seated himself in the throne and when he did not he ended up being killed and the same patrons stuffed him in the chair and gleefully continued on with the service.
It is my belief that the figure of the Patriarch or Pope was absolutely essential to the development of Christianity. I believe that St. Mark developed his gospel for the specific purpose of enshrining himself as the spiritual ruler of the world or at the very least the congregation of Christians who made the pilgrimage to his church in Alexandria.
This is why his gospel, the Gospel According to Mark, ends with an enthronement. The Roman Church Father Irenaeus emphasizes that in his orthodox copies of the Gospel of Mark the proper ending to the narrative has Jesus ended up seated in a throne in heaven. Nevertheless he also makes clear that there exists another version of the Gospel of Mark circulating at the time of his writing which emphasized that Jesus and Christ were two different people and that while Jesus ends up being crucified, 'Christ' watched the proceedings with a divinely established state of mind free from emotional disturbance.
Irenaeus' adversaries were clearly Alexandrians who held that Mark underwent the Passion with Jesus in order to empty out his Christ-soul into the Church. This is clear from one of the earliest hymns that have come to us from an Alexandrian Pope.
Peter I lived at the beginning of the fourth century. He is said to have died near the shrine of St Mark just after directing the following words to the Evangelist:
O father most honourable, you evangelist of the only-begotten Saviour, you witness of His passion, you did Christ choose, who is the Deliverer of us all, to be the first pontiff and pillar of this See ... [N]ot without justice, are you counted worthy to be saluted evangelist and bishop. Your successor was Anianus, and the rest in descending series down to the most blessed Theonas, who disciplined my infancy, and deigned to educate my heart. To whom I, a sinner and unworthy, have been beyond my deservings appointed as successor by an hereditary descent ... [T]o you, I say, I with prayers commend it, who are approved as the author and guardian of all preceding and subsequent occupiers of this pontifical chair, and who, holding its first honours, art the successor not of man, but of the God-man, Christ Jesus.
The idea that is being expressed here is that St. Mark emptied the Christ-soul of Jesus into the Alexandrian Church through his Episcopal chair. He witnessed the Passion, partook in the sufferings of Christ and his resurrection and then led the Church in order to continue the process of establishing men as living Gods like himself.
This highly mystical concept is still at the center of Coptic Christianity. However the earliest clues as to how this mysticism functioned in the liturgy of the Church is found on the backrest of the original Episcopal throne.
There is a tree whose branches contain a deliberately asymmetrical distribution of fruit. There are five branches and on each branch counting from right to left we find the following number of fruit:
8, 7, 6, 5 and 9.
The prayer shawls of men in Sephardic Jewish 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 - 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 tree.
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
This is the proper context for the enthronement rituals of the Alexandrian Patriarch - a blending of traditional Egyptian and Jewish expectations of messianic figure seated on a throne.
The iconography is clearly Jewish. There are the four living creatures of Jewish mystical speculation (bull, man, lion, and eagle) flanking each side of the divine throne. But the expectation that a divine king would one day sit on such a throne and rule the world was shared in common by Jewish and Egyptians.
It was undoubtedly for this very reason that the Roman government began to persecute the Alexandrian Church at the end of the second century.
dating back to conversations with his grandfather, Gaston Frank. "He said we represent one of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world," he muses. "I grew up thinking that our family was something like the Last of the Mohicans."