There aren’t many news stories that start out with “The minister has the number 666 tattooed on his arm.” But that’s how this story starts out. Greg brought it to my attention as a sort of “News of the Weird” item. And that’s the way I started to read it, my ironic detachment started slipping before I got very far.

Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda is not your typical minister. De Jesus, or “Daddy” as his thousands of followers call him, does not merely pray to God: He says he is God.

“The spirit that is in me is the same spirit that was in Jesus of Nazareth,” de Jesus says. …

De Jesus and his believers say their church — “Creciendo en Gracia,” Spanish for “Growing in grace” — is misunderstood. Followers of the movement say they have proof that their minister is divine and that their church will one day soon be a major faith in the world.

But even de Jesus concedes that he is an unlikely leader of a church that claims thousands of members in more than 30 countries.

De Jesus, 61, grew up poor in Puerto Rico. He says he served stints in prison there for petty theft and says he was a heroin addict.

De Jesus says he learned he was Jesus reincarnate when he was visited in a dream by angels.

“The prophets, they spoke about me. It took me time to learn that, but I am what they were expecting, what they have been expecting for 2,000 years,” de Jesus says.

The church that he began building 20 years ago in Miami resembles no other. Followers have protested Christian churches in Miami and Latin America, disrupting services and smashing crosses and statues of Jesus.

There’s such a need for an education in (lower case ‘o’) orthodox Christian beliefs. And I also think there’s a basic moral element missing for a totally implausible fraud like this to have attracted thousands.

It is news of the weird, for sure. But it’s also just pathetic. And if you’re old enough to remember Jim Jones and the mass suicides in 1978, it’s also scary.