False Christs and New Messiahs - men who claim to be Jesus - a Word of Warning from the Bible

The British rock band Dire Straits had a hit single entitled Industrial Disease, taken from their album Love Over Gold, that comments on people who claim they are Christ. The lyrics go: "Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong, there's a protest singer, he's singing a protest song."

The Bible warns that in the end days before Armageddon and the second coming of Jesus there will be many false prophets, fake messiahs and men claiming to be the Christ. Matthew 24:5 Jesus himself cautions: "For many will come in my name saying 'I am the Christ' and shall deceive many."

In Matthew 24:23 we are warned again: "Then if any man shall say unto you, lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not."

Whilst Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits wrote and sang of "two men" saying they are Jesus, today there are currently three people I can think of making this claim and one of them is leading a sizable cult-like following in a remote part of Siberia. Let me introduce you to three men who claim to be the Messiah returned. They are David Shayler, Vissarion and Leo Zagami.

David Shayler has a very colourful past and present and is perhaps the most unusual candidate of all as the second coming of Christ. He was a member of MI5 the Security Service but he gained notoriety in the media when he was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act 1989 for leaking secret documents to the Mail On Sunday newspaper in August 1997, alleging that MI5 was paranoid about Socialists and that the organisation had conducted investigations into the lives of Labour Party politicians Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw and Harriet Harman.

He is a journalist and worked for a while for the Sunday Times but his employment there was terminated.

MI5

Shayler joined MI5 in October 1991 and says he began work in F branch, which involved dealing with counter-subversion, including monitoring left-wing groups and activists. Later on in his career he headed the Libyan desk as G9A/5, and during the work he claims that he learned of the MI6 plot to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi.He left working for MI5 in October 1996.

Following his arrest, conviction and imprisonment in 2000, the year afterwards in 2001, he became involved with the 9/11 Truth Movement. Much like David Icke had already done, Shayler increasingly started to talk about conspiracy theories and was quoting the very controversial Protocols of The Elders of Zion, a document that Icke too had spoken of as a reality with regard to New World Order plans.

Daily Mail

In 2007, Shayler announced that he was the Christ returned. In the Daily Mail he said: "I am the messiah and hold the secret of eternal life." On his website he backed up this claim by stating: "David Michael Shayler -- ‘Sheylr’ in Hebrew ... was anointed Messiah on 2 July 2007 and proclaimed on 07.07.07, in line with ancient prophecies."

Pro-cannabis

Because of his past 'celebrity' status Shayler is no stranger to mainstream media coverage but he has many more controversial views on life. He is pro-cannabis, admits to having taken magic mushrooms, is opposed to vaccines and has lived as a squatter in more recent years.

He and fellow squatters had moved into an abandoned English farmhouse but faced eviction. The story was covered in the news media because Shayler was one of the people living there.

He also has a transvestite personality known as Delores Kane who wears mini skirts.

Is this man really Jesus? He doesn't look like Jesus! What do you think?

Second up in our look at modern self-proclaimed messiahs is Vissarion. He used to be Sergey Anatoljeyvitch Torop and was born in Krasnodar in 1961.

He worked as a traffic warden until 1989 when he lost his job, but in May, 1990, at the age of 29, he had a mystical awakening and in 1991, he publicly announced in Minusinsk, on 18 August, that he was Vissarion, the returned Jesus Christ. He thinks of himself as the “Word of God” and his followers today also call him the “Teacher.”

Church of the Last Testament

He founded a new religious movement known as the Church of the Last Testament, or the Community of Unified faith, as it is also known. In 1994, he established a community of followers who have been living in a settlement of villages at Tiberkul, in the remote Siberian Taiga.

It is a territory of 2.5 square kilometres, and is set out as a three-tiered structure: with the Abode of Dawn, the Heavenly Abode, and the Temple Peak. Today there are some 5,000 members based there, although it is believed that his cult-like following amounts to as many as 10,000 worldwide.

Vissarion’s followers are all vegans and are not allowed to swear, smoke, drink alcohol or take drugs. Money is also banned. They believe in reincarnation and also that the world as we know it is soon to end.

Vissarion has fathered six children by two wives, the first wife of whom he expelled. He married the second wife when she was just 19. She had been raised from the age of seven living at his home.

Vissarion, of course, has a natural mother called Nadedja but he regards the Biblical Mary as his real mother. He also has a sister called Irina.

Vissarion, at least looks like the traditional image of Jesus, unlike Shayler and Zagami.

Leo Zagami, who is also known as Leo Lyon Zagami and Leo Young, is the most mysterious of all the supposedly returned messiahs. His claims and life has been so bizarre and controversial that even the conspiracy theorists are divided in their opinions about him. Is he a real whistle-blower, a disinformation agent, working for the Vatican, a CIA employee, an attention seeker, fake, or simply mentally unbalanced? You will find all these opinions out there.

Zagami claims to be from an aristocratic family bloodline. He was born on March 5 1970, in the Gemelli hospital in Rome to Jessica Campbell Lyon Young and and Elio Zagami. He lived in Rome until the age of 24, followed by many years in Norway and England.

Norway

During his years spent in Norway, in the summer of 2005, he married Fatma Suslu, the daughter of a prominent Sufi family. The couple have one child, Isak Rumi Zagami.

It has been reported that Zagami took on the Islamic name Khaled Saifullah Khan when he converted from Catholicism to Islam in 2003. However, the story goes that his wife, betrayed him on trumped up charges and he was arrested in Norway. He claims that he was treated very badly by the legal authorities there and that all this had happened because he was informing the world about the sinister secrets of the Illuminati.

Matrixism

Zagami has been a Catholic, a Christian, a Muslim and even a founder and prophet of a new religion known as Matrixism. On the video included here you can hear him announcing that he is the messiah returned, that he is Christ.

He also claimed to be a former high-ranking member of the Comitato Esecutivo Massonico (Executive Masonic Committee) of Monte Carlo and a high-level member of the Italian Illuminati. He has further said that he is a 33-degree Freemason and was a member of the P2 lodge. He says that he has left his past behind because of the satanic rituals and plans of the Illuminati and the controllers of the world.

The Internet is full of information about Zagami and videos too but much of it is conflicting and most of it dubious as source materials. There is no official Wikipedia entry about him.

I will leave you to make up your own minds about Leo Zagami, the third self-proclaimed messiah in this investigation.

Then, of course, there are many people who don’t even believe that there ever was a Jesus Christ in the first place, and that the Bible is mainly fiction and clever story-telling that has fooled billions of people throughout the ages. What do you believe?