Antichrist

A future archenemy of God who figures in Christian prophecy or, rather, speculation.
He has a pre-Christian prototype, Antiochus Epiphanes, a Greek king of Syria who persecuted the Jews from 167 to 164 b.c. Antiochus installed a statue of Zeus in the Temple, stopped the sacrifices and other ceremonies, and tried to suppress Judaism entirely or at least destroy its distinctive character. Some Jews collaborated with him; others held firm and endured the first known martyrdoms for a religious cause. The biblical book Daniel denounces Antiochus and foretells his downfall. This crisis provoked a rebellion led by the Maccabee brothers, which created a Jewish kingdom that survived until the region fell under Roman dominance.
A fifteenth-century fantasy of the battle with God’s monstrous archenemy, who was to afflict humanity in the last days.
(Ann Ronan Picture Library)
Having endured one persecution, Jews correctly expected more. They hoped for the Messiah, a future God-given champion who would bring lasting deliverance. While they were not so specific about a chief enemy, a new Antiochus, their scripture had long foreshadowed such a person in Ezekiel 38–39, which predicts that an evil northern ruler called Gog will invade the Holy Land and attack the Chosen People.
When Christian writers foretell an archfoe of Christ, he is not at first given the natural title of Antichrist, but the New Testament does coin that word. He makes his debut in Saint Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. Its authenticity has been questioned, but the main point is not affected, and the author may be accepted as Paul in the absence of proof to the contrary. He has heard that some of his converts are expecting Christ’s Second Coming at any moment and have stopped working in the belief that everything will be different. These holy drop-outs, Paul says, should be disowned; Christians must carry on with the ordinary business of life. Not only is the time of the Lord’s return unknown, something else must happen before it occurs: The “Man of Sin” or “Lawless One” must be manifested. He will set himself up as divine; he will work bogus miracles with the devil’s aid and deceive many, including Christians who are not firm in the faith. After this time of testing, like the one inflicted on the Jews by Antiochus, Christ will return indeed and destroy him.
Paul suspects, perhaps, that normal life may still be disrupted by an expectation that the Lawless One will appear soon, even though Christ may not. He explains that this Antichrist has a prerequisite himself. Someone or something is acting to restrain him, and he will not be manifested until that is gone. Paul’s meaning is uncertain. An early guess is that he is thinking of Roman power as a deterrent to any too-spectacular upstart. Rome, however, began to look sinister itself. When a fire devastated the city in the year 64, the emperor Nero, who was suspected of starting it, tried to shift the blame to the Christians. Many were tortured and put to death as incendiaries. This was not strictly persecution, since they were not being martyred for their religion, but the Church regarded it as such ever afterwards. In practice the distinction was hard to draw; it was their religion, which most Romans detested, that Nero was able to exploit. He became one of the archvillains of Christian tradition. After his death he was rumored to be still alive, and some Christians believed, even centuries later, that he would return and himself be the Antichrist.
The last book of the New Testament, the Revelation or Apocalypse ascribed to the apostle John, symbolizes the Roman Empire as a terrible monster, its anti-Christian character expressed in Nero and in the later emperor Domitian, who was widely regarded as, in effect, Nero over again. Revelation is not explicit about an individual Antichrist yet to come, and in two epistles also ascribed to John, the term antichrist is applied more generally to opponents of Christian orthodoxy. But in the writings of Fathers of the Church such as Tertullian, such minor antichrists are seen as precursors of a great one who will appear finally.
Several anticipatory notions became current. Paul’s warning about Antichrist’s pretense of divinity and his deceptive wonder-working caused him to be imagined as a satanic parody of the true Saviour. Owing to the Jews’ supposed guilt in the death of Jesus, many thought that Antichrist would be Jewish himself. One persistent idea was that he would belong to the Israelite tribe of Dan. Genesis 49:17 makes an ominous prophecy—“Dan shall be a serpent in the way, a viper by the path”—and in Revelation 7:4–8, Dan is missing from a list of the tribes that implies divine favor towards the others. A difficulty here is that Dan was one of the northern tribes that were deported by the Assyrians and lost to view, so that it was not part of the main Jewish body. However, these Lost Tribes were still believed to exist somewhere, so a Danite might emerge from concealment and lead his fellow Israelites.
Pseudo-Sibylline writers invented a fuller Antichrist scenario. History would rise to a brief climax with a “Last Emperor” who would bring universal peace and a general Christian triumph. After him, Antichrist would appear and assail Christians with the worst persecution ever. Christ’s Second Coming would follow. During the Middle Ages the Last Emperor was seriously hoped for. With or without him, there were recurrent rumors that Antichrist was near and even that he had been born already.
The witch mania of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by promoting fancies of supernatural evil, made such rumors more specific. In 1599 Antichrist was reported to have been born in Babylon. In 1600 he was born near Paris to a Jewish woman impregnated by Satan. On May 1, 1623, he was allegedly born near Babylon again. Protestants contributed the theory that Antichrist was the Pope, not any particular one, but the Pope in general. A by-product of this antipapal motif was a story that Antichrist had been born long before, as the son of the legendary female pope Joan, and was biding his time in some mysterious retreat, as some had said Nero was.
Russians had ideas of their own. In Napoleon’s time, many of the Orthodox clergy said the French emperor was Antichrist, a view echoed by one of Tolstoy’s characters in War and Peace. Another Russian, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyev (1853–1900), wrote a story with touches of Dostoyevsky, presenting Antichrist as a megalomaniac reformer early in the twenty-first century. He becomes president of the United States of Europe, solves—or appears to solve—major world problems, and wins over all Christians except a remnant and practically all the Jews, who accept him as the Messiah. A few resolute Christians see through him, and so do the Jews when he declares himself “the sole true incarnation of the Supreme Deity of the universe.” A Jewish-led revolt drives him to ruthless measures of repression that break the spell, and he comes to his end. A novel by Robert Hugh Benson has a theme similar to Solovyev’s.