According to the scriptures, the Messiah will one day be back among us. To the masses who regard Premier League football as an ersatz religion, however, he has already arrived.
With scant regard for sanctity, internet forums this week hailed 'the Second Coming of Crist' — and no, the missing letter 'H' is not one of the appalling spelling errors that litter such websites.
The God to whom they refer is Cristiano Ronaldo, by many people's estimation — and certainly his own — the greatest player in the game's history, eclipsing even Pele, Maradona, Messi and all.
After 12 years playing for European giants Real Madrid and Juventus, he has chosen to ease down the curtain on his glittering career at Manchester United: the club where he first came to notice as a prodigiously gifted, though theatrically petulant, teenager.
After the final whistle sounds, Ronaldo's standards have often fallen short of angelic. That much I know having followed his many scrapes and scandals, more of which later.
Nonetheless, when genius is in the offing football fans have short memories, and the hype surrounding his return borders on hysteria. It has made headlines across the globe.
And Mancunian shoppers now gaze up at giant billboards of the great man in trademark gladiatorial pose.
Cristiano Ronaldo (pictured with his girlfriend Georgina Rodriguez) is not merely a footballer these days; he is a one-man, multi-national corporation
And shortly before 3pm this afternoon the hoopla will reach its crescendo.
Before 76,000 delirious fans at Old Trafford, and a vast global TV audience, 36-year-old Ronaldo — in the No.7 shirt that is essential to his 'CR7' brand — will be paraded like some garlanded Roman emperor.
Never one to promise the earth when the stars are in reach, Ronaldo has pledged to reward this adulation, and justify his reported £500,000 a week salary, by leading United to their first Premier League title since 2013.
These days, however, Ronaldo is not merely a footballer; he is a one-man, multi-national corporation, his on-field earnings dwarfed by the hundreds of millions he rakes in by lending his universally recognised image to a staggering range of brands.
Having amassed the world's biggest Instagram following — 341 million and counting — he can reasonably claim to be the most influential person on the planet.
Central to his image — indeed, the premise that forms its very core — is the perception that CR7, and every aspect of his gilded life, is the essence of perfection.
It starts with the magnificent physique he loves to display, whether preening in underwear he promotes or stripping to his waist after scoring.
So tautly defined that it might have been sculpted by Michelangelo, it is the product of a fanatical fitness regime and Cleopatra-style beauty treatments.
Then there is his enviable property portfolio, stretching from New York, where he is said to own a seven-storey mansion and a £15million apartment in Trump Tower, to opulent homes in Madrid, Majorca and on his home island of Madeira, where the airport is named after him and he has his personal museum.
And let's not forget his private jet and fleet of cars — including a white Rolls-Royce, various Ferraris and limited-edition Bugattis (the latest cost £8.5 million and has a top speed of 236mph). It's all small change for a man with an estimated £500million fortune.
But while all these assets enhance his aura, there is something even more important to Ronaldo's global brand today — his role as a devoted father.
'Family comes first,' is the mantra he frequently posts on his Instagram page.
His arrival in Manchester last weekend was announced with another set of photographs with his four young children — the youngest by his glamorous partner, Spanish model Georgina Rodriguez, 27, the older three born following a mystery-shrouded surrogacy arrangement in America.
Relaxing in the sunshine in the 23-acre grounds of their new home — a £6million modern mansion near Alderley Edge, Cheshire, with the obligatory spa and cinema — the message was clear: they were thrilled at the prospect of becoming the Darling Buds of Cheshire.
'Who says there's no sun in Manchester?' ran the caption beneath the images, evidently choreographed to idealise the latest chapter in the Ronaldo myth.
Georgina, who caught Ronaldo's eye five years ago when he shopped in the Madrid branch of Gucci where she was an assistant, showed her own 30 million social media followers a picture of a Cadbury's chocolate bar bearing a Manchester United logo.
What could possibly jeopardise Ronaldo's career? Kathryn Mayorga, 25, alleges Ronaldo (both pictured in 2009) exposed himself to her, requested she perform a sex act and raped her
'How I missed living in the UK,' she wrote beneath another shot, snuggling up to her bare-chested boyfriend. Presumably she was alluding to the time when she worked as a £10-an-hour au pair in Bristol. She added two hashtags: #family and #love.
No doubt we will hear more of her devotion to Ronaldo, their three-year-old daughter Alana Martina, and the surrogates, twins Eva and Mateo, four, and Cristiano Junior, 11 (a promising footballer tipped to play alongside Wayne Rooney's son, Kai, in United's academy team) in a forthcoming fly-on-the-wall Netflix documentary, entitled I Am Georgina.
Perhaps we will also learn how she rose from the humblest of beginnings, starting out as a cocktail waitress in an obscure town in the Spanish Pyrenees.
Her background is not dissimilar from that of Ronaldo, who was raised by his mother in a rundown shack in the backstreets of Madeira's capital Funchal following the death of his alcoholic father. However, the film might draw a discreet veil over certain aspects of her life.
Her father Jorge was jailed for drug-trafficking in his native Argentina. After he died in 2019, Georgina became embroiled in an unedifying family feud.
In a Spanish TV interview, one relative accused her of failing to reveal where her father was buried or show her his death certificate.
Other family members claim she has shunned them since meeting Ronaldo, and one says she refused to ask him to sign a football shirt as a birthday present to her son.
The sour grapes of envy? Whatever the truth, there is certainly another side to Georgina.
She volunteers for a Madrid-based organisation that helps disadvantaged children and by all accounts she is a dedicated mother.
Indeed, from a well-placed source in Madeira, I hear that her insistence on raising the children in a hands-on manner may have brought her into conflict with the family matriarch, Ronaldo's revered mother, Dolores, who has played a major role in Cristiano Jr's upbringing.
'Cristiano owns a fabulous seafront mansion in Funchal, where Dolores lives. But when the pandemic stopped football in Italy [where Ronaldo was playing for Juventus] and he returned to Madeira for a few months, the family didn't stay there as usual,' says the insider.
'Instead, they rented a house at the other end of the island. Some took that to mean that Dolores and Georgina didn't want to be under the same roof. But then, Cristiano's mother has rarely approved of the women in his life. I don't think she thinks anyone is good enough for her son.'
Such gossip is unlikely to trouble CR7. Down the years, he has been
