It’s that magical time of year when the entire world celebrates the birth of our lord and savior, Santa Claus Jesus Christ. He’s gotten a lot of grief over the centuries for repeatedly failing to show up when his followers want him to, but as you’ll see below, there are far worse sins for an attempted messiah than mere absenteeism. You could, say, literally march your followers into the sea, or lead a rowdy mob armed with sticks into battle with a professional army. Let’s keep Christ in Christmas by digging through the trash pile of history to retrieve some of history’s most spectacular failed messiahs.
Hong Xiuquan
After failing the imperial civil service exams, Hong Xiuquan underwent a religious awakening. He didn’t just convert to Christianity, he converted to SUPER CHRISTIANITY, deciding that he was Jesus’ younger brother. I’ve only read the Bible three or four times, I probably missed the part about God having two begotten sons and one of them being a failed Chinese bureaucrat.
Incredibly, Hong amassed tens of thousands of followers and stood in open rebellion against the Qing Dynasty. He and his followers established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and it took imperial China an embarrassingly long time to put the rebellion down. Hong himself died of illness after eating “manna,” a famously unidentifiable heavenly snack described in the book of Exodus. Pour one out for Hong Xiuquan, the somehow-Chinese brother of Jesus Christ who died after eating something he found on the ground.
Moses of Crete
The fifth century C.E. was a time of uncertainty in Europe. The Roman Empire was collapsing in slow motion, and for a continent full of people who had never known anything but rule from the Eternal City, it must have felt like the world itself was coming to an end. A lot of messiah claimants took advantage of the apocalyptic mood, including one guy who targeted the Jews of Crete. He took the name Moses, and preached that his followers would return to the Holy Land. On foot.
He led his followers to a rocky promontory, and assured them that the Mediterranean would part for them just the way that the Red Sea had parted for the Israelites of old. Instead, a bunch of them marched off the cliff, where they either drowned or were dashed on the rocks below. Those that did survive found that Moses had skipped town. Surprise!
Potter Christ
Arnold Potter was a high-ranking member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Chosen by LDS president Brigham Young to lead a mission to Australia, Potter had an interesting realization on the ship across the Pacific: he was, in reality, Potter Christ, Son of the Living God.
He returned to the United States with the phrase “POTTER CHRIST — THE LIVING GOD — THE MORNING STAR” written on his forehead. Astoundingly, Potter Christ amassed a number of followers and moved them to the promised land of Council Bluffs, Iowa. In 1872, Christ told his followers that his assumption to Heaven was imminent, and rode a donkey out to the bluffs. He then majestically ascended to Heaven by leaping off and stupidly smashing himself like a basket of eggs on the rocks below.
John Thom
John Thom was a 19th century Cornish wine merchant who spent some time in an insane asylum, where he decided that he was actually Sir William Honeywood Courtney, King of Jerusalem. Thom managed to amass a small army of farmers, laborers, and relatively poor landowners. Thom initially just marched his merry band preaching his own brand of Victorian socialism, but then the wealthy landowners started to panic.
Thom shot a constable who had been sent to arrest him, and, in a true zero-to-sixty moment for law enforcement, found himself surrounded by the no-shit army. A local magistrate had wrangled more than a hundred hardened soldiers recently returned from India, and they quickly surrounded Thom’s followers. The resulting slaughter, known as the “Battle” of Bossenden Wood, saw Thom and eight of his followers killed by the army. Shockingly, the literal sticks and stones that Thom’s followers were armed with proved less formidable than, uh, rifles.
Bernhard Müller
A German mystic and daughter of the treacherous river lord Walder Frey, Bernhard Müller soon realized that the United States were the real big leagues of religious nutcasery. Accordingly, he wrote a nice letter to the Harmony Society in Pennsylvania, outlining his true identity as the Lion of Judah and his ownership of the philosopher’s stone. The Harmonites took the bait, and Müller’s followers crossed the Atlantic in an attempt to weld the two communities together.
It wasn’t a happy union. The Harmonites believed in celibacy, which is hard for anyone to get excited about. When Müller arrived with his comparatively libertine followers, a number of Harmonites defected. Ultimately, the Müllerites left with $105,000 — a tidy sum for 19th century ascetics — and attempted to make fetch happen with a number of their own settlements. Two years later, the Lion of Judah died of cholera, having led what remained of his followers to Louisiana of all places. Whoops!
