Jonas Bendiksen grew up in a “godless home” in Tønsberg, Norway, which makes him an unlikely candidate to photograph the messiah, let alone six of them. But this is what he has spent the past three years doing: chronicling the lives of men – and they are all men – who claim to be Jesus returned to Earth, from Siberia to the Philippines, Japan to Devon.

A member of the Magnum photo agency, 39-year-old Bendiksen describes himself as ardently scientific: “Faith has always been very hard for me to conceptualise,” he says. He thinks it might be this lack of preconceptions that has allowed him “to go and touch divinity itself”. He has no interest in mocking or defrocking his Jesus claimants: “My mission was to say, ‘OK, if one were to accept the prophecy of Jesus’s return, why wouldn’t it be this guy?’”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Shayler in a Redcar cafe. All photographs: Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos

But there were a lot to choose from. First, he drew up criteria. A messiah, Bendiksen decided, needed to be in the public sphere, to have lived their revelation (as a Christ) for many years and to have published scripture. These being modern messiahs, Bendiksen found them on Google. After that, some were easier to track down than others. David Shayler, for instance, the former MI5 whistleblower turned Jesus claimant, is what Bendiksen calls “a digital messiah”, and responded quickly on Twitter. His email sign-off (and his signature in church visiting books) reads “David Shayler, the Christ”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shayler’s alter ego Dolores, preaching.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shayler watching an eclipse in Yorkshire, on the spot where he delivered a Sermon on the Mount in 2008.

Shayler, and his alter ego Dolores, cuts a lonely figure in Bendiksen’s photographs. The revelation that he was Jesus came to him in 2007, he told Bendiksen, which makes him one of the newer messiahs. Others, such as Vissarion of Siberia, have thousands of followers; even on Twitter, Shayler has fewer than 350. “You ask him about it and he says, ‘That’s not a problem’,” Bendiksen explains. “He says, ‘If you follow me, you’ll only end up at my house. Follow the way.’ He’s more of a lone operator.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Shayler meditates on a hill outside Middlesbrough.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dolores speaks to her flock.

One of Bendiksen’s portraits shows Shayler on a hill outside Middlesbrough, arms open, his solitary companion’s orange jumper lit by sunset. Another shows him alone in a cafe sipping coffee; his tiny cup does not overfloweth, his expression is distinctly woebegone. Is this really what Jesus looks like?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shayler as Dolores, who he believes embodies the feminine aspects of divinity.

When Bendiksen first met Shayler, the photographer says, he was barefoot and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a quote from Albert Camus (“All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”). He was staying at a friend’s house in Devon, and cats wandered through the room while they talked. A hen idled by. Shayler’s jeans were full of holes, his laptop keyboard strewn with tobacco. None of this, Bendiksen points out, is very far from the gospels’ version of Jesus – “that idea of someone on the outside of society, critiquing it”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Followers of Vissarion, a former traffic policeman who founded the Church of the Last Testament in Petropavlovka, Siberia, enjoy a communal supper.

Other messiahs fit the familiar iconography of Christianity more closely. The disciples of Vissarion, a 56-year-old former traffic policeman in the Siberian town of Minusinsk, for instance, are photographed side by side at a long, laden table, in an obvious allusion to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Vissarion himself, who founded his Church of the Last Testament in the early 90s, wears white and has shoulder-length hair and a beard, like an older, more earthbound version of the Jesus in Raphael’s Transfiguration. His off-grid, utopian villages in the Siberian woods “have attracted a very creative crowd”, Bendiksen says, “all these beautiful rituals with choral music and processions amid these harsh conditions”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vissarion greets his flock at a Christmas pilgrimage. The festival coincides with his birthday.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Some of Vissarion’s 5,000-strong flock dance around a fire.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vissarion’s temple in Petropavlovka.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A priest leads a Christmas ceremony inside the temple in Petropavlovka.

Not every messiah Bendiksen approached was happy to meet him, however; Jesus Matayoshi of Japan declined his request. But Moses Hlongwane of South Africa was very welcoming, even offering Bendiksen the left side of his double bed, because the other two rooms in his small concrete house in Eshowe, near Durban, were occupied by disciples.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Moses Hlongwane, known to his disciples as the Lord of Lords, looking over Eshowe in South Africa.

“It was an invitation to really get to know the messiah,” Bendiksen says. “Each night we had a nice chat in bed.” They lay side by side, Bendiksen reading from a King James Bible, Hlongwane “frantically thumbing away on his phone”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hlongwane being served dinner in his bedroom by Angel the Prophetess.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hlongwane talking with followers in bed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hlongwane used to work as a jewellery salesman.

While Vissarion was aloof, agreeing to meet the photographer only on his third visit to Siberia, Bendiksen’s images of Hlongwane’s headquarters are suffused with domestic warmth. There are bedspreads and blankets, patchwork floors and louvre doors; a woman prays next to a domestic steam iron. Hlongwane, who used to work as a jewellery salesman, says he has been fighting the devil since God first told him in a dream, in 1992, that he was the messiah. His recent marriage, he preaches, signals the beginning of “the End of Days”. It’s a homely, improvised kind of messiahship. His plain white cap is embellished with silver studs that spell out “Jesus” and “King of Kings”. Hlongwane’s disciples, Bendiksen recalls, “were full of faith. Full of hope. They saw meaning everywhere.” He thinks his own godlessness gave him an open mind and a reluctance to judge; the images remain staunchly faithful to their subjects.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A disciple speaks to Hlongwane through his bedroom door.

“People ask me, ‘Did you feel the divine when in the presence of the messiahs?’” Bendiken says. And did he? “With Moses, all I can say is I felt a lot of some things. But what is the divine? I don’t know.” Did he feel anything physically, if not spiritually? He thinks. “The disciples were always breaking into gospel song. In that setting, with all that energy flowing towards Moses, yes, I could feel it physically.” He likens it to experiencing “a great piece of music”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angel the Prophetess and Hlongwane preparing to get married in 2016.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angel the Prophetess and Hlongwane’s wedding – the knife represents the Bible verse, ‘For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword’.

But it was his time in Siberia that he found the most personally confronting. “Ask my wife,” he says. “Every time I got back from Vissarion’s land, I was disturbed – and I mean disturbed in a positive sense. It was very seductive.” The community builds its own houses, grows its own food. “I really liked that place. I’m convinced I could live there and have a very happy life. Can man create that on his own, or do you need divine intervention? If it takes faith and belief to create that sort of community, does it matter if it’s true or not?”

Maybe faith, these pictures seem to say, creates its own kind of truth.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photographs of Vissarion adorn a painting of the biblical Jesus.

The Last Testament, by Jonas Bendiksen, is published next week by Aperture/GOST at £40. To order a copy for £34, go to guardianbookshop.com, or call 0330 333 6846.