Roxana Cooper Wrote:
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> I think I'm slightly offended by the inclusion of
> Moses in that list of false messiahs. For one
> thing he never claimed to BE a messiah just a
> prophet - and a reluctant one at that. Nor was
> Judaism a personality cult, it went on after
> Moses' death. Mormons would probably be unhappy
> about Joseph Smith's presence too.

Sorry, didn't mean to be offensive, but the messianic pattern is both powerful and pervasive.

False messiahs? I didn't use that F-word, myself, though it seems to me that all messiahs are regarded as false by outsiders. Some of them, however, are successful, and some of them crash and burn. Moses fits the messianic profile in claiming a special revelation and a special mission from God, and in the details of the Mosaic narrative.

In fact, a case could be made that all faiths, and many other human institutions, started off as some variant of a personality cult and then (in Max Weber's term) routinized into something a little more stable. The personality cults of, say, Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Ayn Rand, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Mary Baker Eddy etc etc etc, routinized into lasting institutions. Those of, say, Jim Jones, Hitler, Wovoka, Simon bar Kochba, Sabbatai Zevi, and the Sudanese Mahdi, among many many others, crashed and burned and ended up as horrible examples. But structurally, they are all eerily similar.