Everything in Rastafari runs back to one man and to the question of what he was.
Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned emperor of Ethiopia on 2 November 1930 and took the throne name Haile Selassie I, together with the titles King of Kings, Lord of Lords and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Those titles are not ceremonial flourishes to a reader of the Bible: the Lion of the tribe of Judah appears in Revelation 5, King of Kings and Lord of Lords in Revelation 19, and the Ethiopian dynasty claimed descent from Solomon. For preachers in Jamaica who had absorbed Garvey's pan-Africanism and the Ethiopianist reading of Psalm 68, that Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God, a black African emperor crowned with those exact titles was not a coincidence. It was prophecy landing.
What Rastafari make of him varies, and always has. At one end, Haile Selassie is God incarnate, Jah in person, the returned Christ in his kingly character. In the middle, he is a manifestation or expression of Jah rather than the whole of God. At the other end he is not divine at all, but the greatest of black leaders, the living proof against a world that insisted Africa had produced nothing, and a figure of enormous symbolic weight. All three are held within the movement, and no authority exists that could adjudicate between them.
The tension is sharpened by the emperor himself, who never claimed divinity and denied it when asked. In a 1967 interview with the Canadian broadcaster Bill McNeil he replied to the suggestion that millions regarded him as divine by saying that he had told them clearly he was a man, mortal, and that no one should suppose a human being to be emanated from a deity. He remained an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian all his life, and in 1970 arranged for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to establish itself in Jamaica.
Rastafari read the denial in different ways: as a straightforward denial, as the humility one would expect of a divine figure, or as deliberate concealment. His deposition in 1974 and death in 1975 produced the same divergence, some denying the death outright, some holding the fate of the flesh irrelevant, and some leaving.