What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionAn awaited figure who will arrive, or return, to set the world right.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Unification Church (Family Federation) are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfHow truth arrives
Travels across6 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderThe Church of the SubGenius · 1979 CE
Turns up as15 tenets · 10 figures · 2 storys · 2 scriptures
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 18 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 11 faiths of this family hold it
In Jesus, God became human.
The incarnation: fully God and fully man, born under an empire and executed by it.
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Christ will come again.
The creed's unfinished clause: history has a direction and a judge, and the same figure who came in weakness returns in glory. Every liturgy leans toward it — come, Lord.
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The messianic age is still ahead.
Whether a person or an era, redemption has not yet come — expectation is part of the faith.
held by most
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Sabbatai Zevi puts on a turban.
Communities from Yemen to Amsterdam sold property and prepared to leave. When it collapsed, Nathan of Gaza explained the apostasy as a descent into the husks to redeem them, and a Sabbatean underground survived for generations — which is much of why later rabbis distrusted enthusiasm.
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Haile Selassie I is divinity crowned.
The 1930 coronation read through scripture: King of Kings, Lion of Judah — held by many as God incarnate, by others as Jah's chosen king.
held by most
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The coronation.
Marcus Garvey had said: look to Africa, where a Black king shall be crowned. In 1930 the newspapers carried the photographs from Addis Ababa — and in the yards of Kingston, readers of scripture recognized what they saw.
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The Second Coming already happened, and the church has been living in it since.
Shakers hold that the Christ Spirit appeared a second time in Ann Lee, which means the millennium is not awaited but inhabited. Everything else follows: if this is the resurrection life, then people neither marry nor are given in marriage, and the community is heaven's order tried out on earth.
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God's Kingdom is a real government.
Established, Witnesses hold, in 1914 — soon to replace every human rule. The good news is an announcement of state.
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The restored church follows one God and Jesus Christ.
La Luz del Mundo identifies Jesus Christ as God's Son and Savior and belongs to a nontrinitarian Christian tradition.
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Moses is the only prophet.
One lawgiver, one law; the Taheb — a restorer like Moses — will come to set all things right.
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Christ's return is near and literal.
The Advent that named the movement: visible, personal, soon.
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Koresh said he was the Lamb who could open the seals.
He argued it from Revelation 5: someone has to be found worthy to open the scroll, and he claimed to be that person — a sinful man, not a divine one, which is the distinction members repeated to reporters and to negotiators. The claim also underwrote his taking other men's wives, including girls under the age of consent.
⚖ contested within
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D
David Koresh.
Born Vernon Howell in 1959, a poor reader who had memorised most of the New Testament by his twenties. He took the property in 1987, brought in firearms — legally traded, and part of the community's income — and by 1993 had fathered children with several women in the group, some of them minors.
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Hong Xiuquan is the second son of God.
Not Jesus and not a prophet — a younger brother, with a family relationship and a commission. Missionaries who reached Nanjing found a church that printed the Bible, kept the Sabbath and refused idols, and also held this, and they could not agree among themselves what to call it.
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The cross was a second-best outcome.
The Divine Principle holds that Jesus came to marry and found a sinless lineage, was rejected, and took the crucifixion as the remaining route — a reading no other Christian body accepts.
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Islam
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
I
Isa — the messiah who was not crucified.
Born of a virgin, speaking from the cradle, healing and raising the dead by God's leave — and, on the mainstream reading of Quran 4:157, not killed but taken up while it was made to appear otherwise. He returns before the end. He is not the son of God, and that is the line Islam will not cross.
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T
The Imams — and the one who did not die.
Twelver Shia count twelve, from Ali to Muhammad al-Mahdi, who entered occultation in the ninth century and is held to be alive and hidden. Ismailis broke away at the seventh and still have a living Imam, the Aga Khan. Zaydis take any qualified descendant who rises with a sword.
⚖ contested within
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The promised renewal has come.
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as the awaited messiah and renewer — the claim the mainstream rejects.
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The writings of the Báb.
Enormous in volume and largely untranslated. The Persian Bayán contains laws of extraordinary severity and impracticality, and the tradition's own reading is that they were never intended for implementation — that the Báb's function was to prepare for Him Whom God shall make manifest, and that the laws were a demonstration of authority rather than a code.
⚖ contested within
Open the book — context →
Raëlism
— one faith of this family holds it
T
The Elohim — those who came from the sky.
The movement reads the Hebrew plural as a plural: not God, but the people who made us, and to whom an embassy is owed. They are owed hospitality, not worship.
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The Church of the SubGenius
— one faith of this family holds it
Bob will cheat you, and you should follow him anyway.
The church describes its own god as a salesman who cannot be trusted, and asks for money in the same breath. Members treat the contradiction as the doctrine rather than a flaw in it — a religion honest about being a sales pitch is making a point about the ones that are not.
held by most
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J
J. R. Bob Dobbs.
A clip-art salesman from a 1950s advertisement, pipe clenched, smiling. He is assassinated repeatedly in church literature and returns each time. His face is the church's entire iconography and is reproduced more often than any doctrine it holds.
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Vedic Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
M
Maitreya — the one to come.
Buddhism's open future: the next Buddha, waiting — the guarantee that the path never closes behind the last teacher.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
T
The Saoshyant.
A future saviour born of a virgin who bathes in the lake where Zarathustra's seed is miraculously preserved, who will raise the dead and preside over the renovation. Whether Jewish and Christian messianism drew on this during the Persian period is argued about; the chronology makes it hard to rule out.
held by most
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
T
The Imams — and the one who did not die.
Twelver Shia count twelve, from Ali to Muhammad al-Mahdi, who entered occultation in the ninth century and is held to be alive and hidden. Ismailis broke away at the seventh and still have a living Imam, the Aga Khan. Zaydis take any qualified descendant who rises with a sword.
Meet them — context →
The writings of the Báb.
Enormous in volume and largely untranslated. The Persian Bayán contains laws of extraordinary severity and impracticality, and the tradition's own reading is that they were never intended for implementation — that the Báb's function was to prepare for Him Whom God shall make manifest, and that the laws were a demonstration of authority rather than a code.
Open the book — context →
Koresh said he was the Lamb who could open the seals.
He argued it from Revelation 5: someone has to be found worthy to open the scroll, and he claimed to be that person — a sinful man, not a divine one, which is the distinction members repeated to reporters and to negotiators. The claim also underwrote his taking other men's wives, including girls under the age of consent.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →