Antichrist

• 1. A Charge in Parliament

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  In 1988, the Evangelical minister Ian Paisley accused Pope John Paul II of being the Antichrist, and he did it while the pope was speaking to the European Parliament. Paisley, founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, sat in that body as a member. Video recorded his accusation, along with the reactions of the pope and of other members.

  The word Paisley chose names a figure in Christian prophecy who is expected to oppose Jesus Christ and pose as a savior before the Second Coming. Yet the Bible's own use of the word is narrow. Is the Antichrist one person still to come, or an institution already in power? Is he a crowd of ordinary false teachers? And why do Jewish and Muslim stories about the end of time each feature an ultimate deceiver of their own?

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• 2. Greek Roots

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  Two ancient Greek words, anti and Christos, are joined inside the name Antichrist. Christos means anointed one, and the English word Christ descends from it. Anti can mean against or opposite of. It can also mean in place of, and that second meaning suggests a counterfeit rather than a simple enemy.

  The letters of John are the only place in the New Testament where the word itself appears. One passage announces that it is the last hour and says that "many antichrists have come." Another defines the antichrist as the one "who denies the Father and the Son." A third calls anyone who refuses to confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh "the deceiver and the antichrist."

  Grammar matters here. The phrases "the deceiver" and "the antichrist" are usually read as marking out a category of people rather than one individual. Whether the New Testament contains a single personal Antichrist at all is disputed.

  In Matthew chapter 24 and Mark chapter 13, Jesus uses a related term, pseudokhristos, meaning false messiah or false Christ. He tells his disciples not to be deceived by false prophets who claim to be the Christ and who perform "great signs and wonders." Their aim, he says, is to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. The historian Josephus described many false messiahs in his accounts, yet he never used this word.

  Jewish writings from the years 500 BC to 50 AD show no sign of a concept like the antikhristos. The scholar Bernard McGinn conjectures that it grew from frustration among Jews living under capricious Seleucid or Roman rule. Their idea of Satan was nebulous, closer to an opposing angel in the heavenly court, and it was not human or personal enough to embody evil.

  The passage most often read as a portrait of one great villain, in Paul's second letter to the Thessalonians, never uses the word antichrist at all.

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• 3. The Lawless One

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  In the second chapter of 2 Thessalonians, Paul begs his readers not to be shaken in mind by claims that the day of the Lord has already arrived. "Let no one deceive you in any way," he writes. That day will not come, he says, unless the rebellion comes first and "the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction." This figure exalts himself above every so-called god and takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God.

  Paul adds that the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until "the one who now restrains it is removed." Tradition calls this restrainer the Katechon. Whether the Katechon is a person at all is uncertain, and the question is still debated. When the restraint lifts, the Lord Jesus will destroy the lawless one "with the breath of his mouth." His coming is marked by the working of Satan, with "lying wonders" and every kind of wicked deception.

  Caligula, Nero and an Antichrist of the end times have all been proposed as the man of lawlessness. Commentaries on his identity vary greatly. Some scholars think the passage holds no genuine prediction. They see it as Paul's own speculation, built on ideas about the Antichrist that were then current.

  Daniel's final vision supplies the little horn, and the Book of Revelation supplies the Beast of the Sea. Several American evangelical and fundamentalist theologians, including Cyrus Scofield, identify the Antichrist as allied with, or identical to, more Revelation figures. They name the Dragon, the Beast, the False Prophet and the Whore of Babylon.

  Bernard McGinn described several traditions about how the Antichrist relates to Satan. In the dualist version, Satan becomes incarnate in the Antichrist, just as God became incarnate in Jesus. Orthodox thinkers found that too close to Christ's incarnation, and it hinted at dualism. The indwelling view won out instead. It holds that the Antichrist is a human being inhabited by Satan, whose power is not equal to God's.

  Luca Signorelli's fresco, The Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist, shows the indwelling view. Satan whispers in the ear of a Christlike figure. Some viewers read the devil's left arm as slipping through the figure's garment, as if he is manipulating him.

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• 4. Fathers and Fallen Rome

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  The Odes of Solomon, written in the first or second century by an Essene convert to Christianity, picture a redeemer overcoming a monstrous dragon. Polycarp was the only one of the late first and early second century Apostolic Fathers to use the word antichrist. He warned the Philippians that everyone who preached false doctrine was an antichrist. Like the New Testament, he pointed to a class of people rather than a single person.

  Irenaeus, who lived in the second century and died around 202, wrote Against Heresies to refute the Gnostics. In Book V he calls the Antichrist the "recapitulation of apostasy and rebellion." He used 666, the Number of the Beast in Revelation 13:18, to decode possible names. He loosely proposed Teitan, Evanthos and Lateinos, the last meaning Latin, or pertaining to the Roman Empire. Reading Daniel 7:21, he said the ten horns of the beast would be the Roman Empire divided into ten kingdoms before the Antichrist arrived. Evoking Jeremiah 8:16, he added that the Antichrist would come from the tribe of Dan. His readings stayed theological rather than historical.

  The non-canonical Ascension of Isaiah presents the Antichrist as Belial and as Nero.

  Tertullian, who lived from about 160 to about 220, read the restraining force in 2 Thessalonians as the Roman Empire itself. He asked: "What obstacles are there but the Roman state, the rebellion of which, by being scattered into the ten kingdoms, will introduce the Antichrist upon its own ruins?" For Tertullian, the fall of the Western Roman Empire would clear the way.

  Hippolytus of Rome, who lived from about 170 to about 236, also said the Antichrist would come from the tribe of Dan. He expected him to rebuild the Jewish temple on the Temple Mount and reign from it. He identified him with the Beast out of the Earth in Revelation. The phrase "horns like a lamb" meant to Hippolytus that the Antichrist would make himself like the Son of God. The line that the beast spoke like a dragon marked him as a deceiver, not truthful.

  Origen, who lived from 185 to 254, took up the view of the Antichrist held by Celsus and answered it. He asked where the absurdity lay in saying that humanity has two extremes. One extreme is virtue, embodied in Jesus. The opposite is embodied in the man named Antichrist. Evil, Origen argued, reaches its greatest height when it imitates the good. That is why "signs, and marvels, and lying miracles" accompany it, through the cooperation of the devil.

  Cyril of Jerusalem, in the mid-fourth century, devoted part of his fifteenth catechetical lecture to the Antichrist. He taught that the figure would rule the world for three and a half years. Jesus Christ would then kill him, shortly before Christ's return.

  Athanasius of Alexandria, who lived from about 298 to 373, linked the Antichrist to Arius. He wrote that since the Council of Nicaea, Arius's error had been reckoned a heresy more than ordinary, "known as Christ's foe, and harbinger of the Antichrist." Martin of Tours, who lived from about 336 to 397, predicted that the world would end before 400 CE. He wrote: "There is no doubt that the Antichrist has already been born."

  John Chrysostom, who lived from about 347 to 407, urged restraint. "Let us not therefore enquire into these things," he preached. Knowing Paul's description in 2 Thessalonians, he said, would be enough for Christians to avoid deception.

  Jerome, who lived from about 347 to 420, wrote to Pope Damasus I that "He that is not of Christ is of Antichrist." He said that people who substituted false interpretations for the real meaning of scripture belonged to the "synagogue of the Antichrist." To Jerome, the Roman Empire was the power holding back the mystery of lawlessness, and its fall removed the restraint. He told a noble woman of Gaul: "He that letteth is taken out of the way, and yet we do not realize that Antichrist is near." Savage tribes in countless numbers, he wrote, had overrun Gaul. The country between the Alps and the Pyrenees, and between the Rhine and the Ocean, lay waste. The raiders included Quadi, Vandals, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepids, Herules, Saxons, Burgundians, Alemanni and Pannonians.

  In his Commentary on Daniel, Jerome rejected the idea that the Antichrist is the Devil or a demon. He wrote instead of "one of the human race, in whom Satan will wholly take up his residence in bodily form." He denied that this figure would rebuild the Jewish Temple. In Jerome's view, the Antichrist sits in God's Temple by making himself out to be like God. He also dismissed Porphyry's claim that the little horn in Daniel chapter 7 was Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The little horn, Jerome noted, is defeated by an eternal, universal ruler right before the final judgment.

  Around 380, a pseudo-prophecy falsely attributed to the Tiburtine Sibyl described Constantine as victorious over Gog and Magog. It predicted that once the Roman empire ceased, the Antichrist would be openly revealed and sit in the House of the Lord in Jerusalem. Two famous men, Elijah and Enoch, would announce the coming of the Lord. The Antichrist would kill them, and after three days they would be raised up. He would finally be slain through the power of God by Michael the Archangel on the Mount of Olives.

  Augustine of Hippo, who lived from 354 to 430, admitted it was uncertain in what temple the Antichrist would sit. It might be the ruin of the temple built by Solomon, or it might be the Church. Gregory of Tours claimed the Antichrist would place his image in the temple in Jerusalem for worship. He would assert that he was Christ and call on Christians to undergo circumcision. In 597, Pope Gregory I wrote to the Byzantine Emperor Maurice about the titles of bishops. Anyone who desired to call himself "universal priest" in self-exaltation, he said, was a precursor of the Antichrist.

  By the end of the tenth century, the Benedictine monk Adso of Montier-en-Der had compiled a biography of the Antichrist from exegetical and Sibylline sources. His account became one of the best-known descriptions of the figure in the Middle Ages. In 1604, Tomàs Maluenda published De Antichristo libri undecim, still considered the most complete treatise on the subject.

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• 5. The Pope Accused

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  In 991, at the Council of Reims, Arnulf, bishop of Orléans, accused Pope John XV of being the Antichrist. Arnulf disagreed with the pope's policies and morals, and he borrowed Paul's language about the lawless one. He argued that a man empty of charity and lifted up in vain knowledge was "Antichrist sitting in God's temple and showing himself as God." This incident is the earliest record of anyone identifying a pope with the Antichrist.

  Pope Gregory VII, who lived from about 1015 or 1029 to 1085, used the label against an enemy. He described Wilbert, plunderer of the church of Ravenna, as "Antichrist, and arch-heretic." Cardinal Benno, on the opposite side of the Investiture Controversy, turned the charge back on Gregory. Benno listed alleged abuses including necromancy, torture of a former friend upon a bed of nails, an attempted assassination, and executions without trials. He held that Gregory was "either a member of Antichrist, or Antichrist himself."

  In 1241, Eberhard II von Truchsees, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, denounced Pope Gregory IX at the Council of Regensburg. He called him "that man of perdition, whom they call Antichrist, who in his extravagant boasting says, I am God, I cannot err." Eberhard held that the papacy was the little horn of Daniel 7:8. In his reading, that horn was reducing three kingdoms, Sicily, Italy and Germany, to servitude.

  Emperor Frederick II drew a stranger label from some Franciscans. They considered him a positive Antichrist who would purify the Catholic Church of opulence, riches and clergy.

  In 1518, Huldrych Zwingli became pastor of the Grossmünster in Zurich and began preaching reform. A Catholic priest before he became a Reformer, he often called the pope the Antichrist. He wrote: "I know that in it works the might and power of the Devil, that is, of the Antichrist." John Wycliffe, famous across Europe for opposing Catholic practice, and John Hus had already begun the push toward reform.

  Martin Luther declared that not just a pope from time to time but the Papacy itself was Antichrist, because the popes represented an institution opposed to Christ. He called the papal system "nothing else than the kingdom of Babylon and of the very Antichrist." John Calvin wrote that "The name Antichrist does not designate a single individual, but a single kingdom which extends throughout many generations." He called both Muhammad and the Catholic popes antichrists. Rather than waiting for one ruler in a future Tribulation, these Reformers saw the Antichrist as a present feature of their world.

  The English Reformer William Tyndale agreed that Roman Catholic realms were the empire of Antichrist. In The Parable of the Wicked Mammon, he rejected the established Church teaching that an Antichrist would rise in the future. He taught that Antichrist is a present spiritual force that returns under different religious disguises. His translation of 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 reflected this view, but later revisers amended it significantly. They included the King James Bible committee, which followed the Vulgate more closely.

  In Magdeburg, a group of Lutheran scholars headed by Matthias Flacius, the Centuriators of Magdeburg, wrote the 12-volume Magdeburg Centuries. Their goal was to discredit the Catholic Church and lead other Christians to recognize the Pope as the Antichrist.

  The belief entered formal doctrine. The Smalcald Articles of 1537 and Philip Melanchthon's Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, from the same year, contain it. So do the Westminster Confession of 1646 and the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. In 1754, John Wesley published his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, which remains a Doctrinal Standard of the United Methodist Church. On Revelation chapter 13 he wrote: "The whole succession of Popes from Gregory VII are undoubtedly Antichrists."

  In 1973, the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue in the United States signed an agreement on Papal Primacy and the Universal Church. It acknowledged that early Lutherans, in calling the pope the Antichrist, stood in a tradition reaching back to the eleventh century. Even saints, the text says, had used the title when they wished to castigate abuse of power.

  The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod still teaches that the papacy bears two marks of the Antichrist. The pope claims a right to rule the church that belongs only to Christ, and he teaches that salvation comes by faith and works. The synod says the Bible presents the Antichrist as an office held through successive generations: "It is a title like King of England." Many conservative Lutheran churches and the Seventh-day Adventists still officially hold that the Papacy is the Antichrist.

  Seventh-day Adventists date the little horn's rule with unusual precision, from 538 to 1798. In 533, the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I legally recognized the bishop of Rome as head of all Christian churches. Arian domination of parts of the empire by barbarian tribes kept that authority from being exercised. In 538, the general Belisarius withstood a siege of Rome by Arian Ostrogoths, and the bishop of Rome could begin establishing universal civil authority. The period ends in 1798, when the French general Louis-Alexandre Berthier took Pope Pius VI captive. Adventists count this span as 1,260 years, matching Daniel 7:25, "a time and times and half a time," and they include the 67 years of the Avignon Captivity from 1309 to 1376.

  Ellen G. White, the Adventist pioneer who lived from 1827 to 1915, saw the pope as the Antichrist. She warned that Rome "is silently growing into power."

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• 6. Catholic Replies

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  In the sixteenth century, Catholic Jesuits advanced the views known as Preterism and Futurism in response to the claim that the Papacy was the Antichrist. Both systems conflict with the historicist method of reading prophecy. The Jesuit Luis de Alcasar, who lived from 1554 to 1613, wrote the first systematic preterist exposition of prophecy. It was titled Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalypsi and was published in 1614.

  The Fifth Council of the Lateran forbids priests to "preach or declare a fixed time for...the coming of antichrist." The Catholic Church teaches that before the Second Coming it must pass through a final trial it calls the mystery of iniquity. Paragraph 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes that trial as "a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth." It continues: "The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God."

  Paragraph 676 of the Catechism places the Antichrist's deception in any claim to realize within history a messianic hope that can only be realized beyond history. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification under the name of millenarianism. It singles out the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.

  Pope Pius IX, in the encyclical Quartus Supra, quoted Cyprian to say that Satan disguises the Antichrist with the title of Christ. Pope Pius X, in the encyclical E Supremi, said the mark of the Antichrist is claiming to be God and taking his place. Pope Pius XI, in Divini Redemptoris, compared Communism to the pseudo-messianism of the Antichrist.

  On the 18th of August 1985, during his journey to Africa, Pope John Paul II cited 1 John 4:3. He said it evokes the danger of theology divorced from holiness. On the 11th of March 2012, Pope Benedict XVI said in the Sunday Angelus that violence is the tool of the Antichrist. Pope Francis, in a morning meditation on the 2nd of February 2014, said that the Apostle James calls the ideologues of the faith the Antichrist. On the 11th of November 2016, he said that anyone who denies that the criterion of Christian love is the Incarnation is the Antichrist.

  The Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen wrote in 1951 that "The Antichrist will not be so called; otherwise he would have no followers." He imagined a figure who would come as the Great Humanitarian, talking of peace and prosperity as ends in themselves. His secret, Sheen wrote, would be that he does not believe in God, and his religion would be "brotherhood without the fatherhood of God."

  The Prophecy of the Popes, which historians identify as a sixteenth-century forgery, claims Rome will be destroyed during the pontificate of the last Pope. That claim implies a link between the final pope and the Antichrist.

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• 7. Other Faiths, Other Villains

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  The Old Testament contains warnings against false prophets, called Navi-Sheker, but Jewish eschatology also developed a monstrous anti-Messiah. His name is Armilus, and he appears in the seventh-century Sefer Zerubbabel and the eleventh-century Midrash Vayosha. Armilus is said to be the offspring of Satan and a statue, and he is declared the God and Messiah of the Christians. One description calls him "a monstrosity, bald-headed, with one large and one small eye, deaf in the right ear and maimed in the right arm, while the left arm is two and one-half ells long." He is considered similar to, or even identical with, Gog. His destruction by Messiah ben Joseph, a Messiah of the tribe of Joseph, symbolizes the ultimate victory of the Jewish Messiah in the Messianic Age.

  Al-Masih ad-Dajjal is the evil figure of Islamic eschatology. The Quran never mentions him, but the hadith literature describes him as one-eyed. His right eye is blind, and it looks like a bulging grape. He is said to emerge in the east, though the specific location varies among sources. He will imitate the miracles of Isa, who is Jesus, by healing the sick and raising the dead, the latter with the aid of demons, and he will deceive many people.

  The Mahdi, whose name means the rightly guided one, is the redeemer in Islam, and the Quran does not mention him either. Hadith literature places the Dajjal among the Greater Signs of the end, together with Jesus returning to fight him at Dabbiq in Syria. A hadith attributed to Ali ibn Abi Talib says God will kill the Dajjal in Syria, at a pass called the Pass of Afiq. Another account says Isa kills him at the gate of Lud, where the Dajjal dissolves slowly, like salt in water. Isa and the Mahdi will then rid the world of wrongdoing, injustice and tyranny.

  Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, whose teachings shaped the Ahmadiyya movement, read the Dajjal as a group of nations rather than an individual. The reference to the Antichrist as one person, in this view, signals a unified class or system. Ahmadis identify it with the missionary expansion and colonial dominance of European Christianity, which the Industrial Revolution propelled. Ghulam Ahmad held that these missionaries should be countered through argument, not warfare, and that their power would gradually disintegrate.

  In the Baháʼí Faith, the Antichrist subverts the religion of God from the inner reality of man. 'Abdu'l-Baha taught that Christ was a divine center of unity and love. "Whenever discord prevails instead of unity," he said, and hatred takes the place of love, "Antichrist reigns instead of Christ."

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• 8. Modern Faces

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  The Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky explained the necessity of rebaptizing Roman Catholics, Protestants and Nestorians by attacking the papacy. He judged Latins worse than Monophysites and Monophelites because they "created a second Christ, i.e., the antichrist in the person of the Pope, who is supposedly infallible."

  After Patriarch Nikon of Moscow reformed the Russian Orthodox Church in the second half of the seventeenth century, many Old Believers held that Peter the Great was the Antichrist. Peter ruled the Russian Empire until his death in 1725. They objected to his subordinating the church to the state, to requirements that clergymen conform to civilian standards such as shaved beards and fluency in French, and to state taxes on them. Old Believers hold two conceptions of the Antichrist. The sensual Antichrist is a particular person who will rule at the end of times for a literal 3.5 years. The spiritual Antichrist rules through many people in a heretical church and state, since the year 1000 in the West and since 1666 in Russia.

  Bernard McGinn noted that complete denial of the Antichrist was rare until the Age of Enlightenment. After frequent Antichrist rhetoric in the religious controversies of the seventeenth century, the concept declined during the eighteenth century. Enlightened absolutists ruled Europe then and held great influence over official state churches. Efforts to cleanse Christianity of legendary or folk accretions removed the Antichrist from discussion in mainstream Western churches.

  In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Antichrist is anyone or anything that counterfeits the true gospel and openly or secretly stands in opposition to Christ. The great antichrist is Lucifer, who has many assistants, both spirit beings and mortals. Latter-day Saints draw on 1 John 2:18 and 22, 1 John 4:3-6 and 2 John 1:7. They also draw on the Book of Mormon passages Jacob 7:1-23, Alma 1:2-16 and Alma 30:6-60.

  In February 1900, the Christian Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov published A Short Tale of the Antichrist, his apocalyptic vision of the coming twentieth century and the end of human history. Soon after World War II, the devout Christian and political theorist Martin Wight favored reviving the doctrine of the Antichrist as a recurrent situation. He pictured not a person but "demonic concentrations of power."

  The founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, called himself the Antichrist in a document originally released only to high-ranking followers. In it he would defend humanity against an alien invasion, for which he believed the Second Coming of Jesus was a metaphor. Many Scientologists who read it for the first time found it highly upsetting. After Hubbard's death the document was revised, and the new version dropped every reference to him as the Antichrist.

  The word has also become a title for music and television. Slayer released a song called "The Antichrist" in 1983 on its debut album, Show No Mercy. The British band The 1975 released a song named "Antichrist" in 2012 on the Facedown EP. Eminem has a track by that name on The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce). In the FX series American Horror Story: Apocalypse, the character Michael Langdon, played by Cody Fern, is labeled the Antichrist and brings about the end times.

  In a Christmas 2018 interview on Russian state television, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow placed the Antichrist at the head of the World Wide Web, controlling all of humanity. He said there shouldn't be a single centre, at least not in the foreseeable future, if people do not want to bring on the apocalypse. He urged listeners to remain free inside and not to fall under any addiction, whether to alcohol, narcotics or gadgets.

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