In all of Christianity no figure (except perhaps God or Satan) evokes as much fear and apprehension as the Antichrist. According to some teachings as the end of the world looms this terrible being will be born, wreaking havoc on those who refuse to follow him.
But who is the Antichrist and where does the idea of him come from? Surprisingly, he’s barely in the Bible, and much of what we know about him is a later invention.
To understand the Antichrist is to unravel the threads of mythology, theology, and political intrigue. As it becomes increasingly common for people to declare he walks among us it’s more important than ever to understand the history behind Christ’s supposed opposite.
Meet the Beast
Put simply, in Christianity the Antichrist is the polar opposite of Jesus. According to some readings of the Bible, he’s prophesied to come as a false Messiah, opposing Jesus before the Second Coming (when Jesus returns to Earth).
In Catholicism particularly the Antichrist’s arrival is seen as a test on Christians. He will arrive as a false prophet and offer to fix all the world’s problems, glorifying himself over God. Those who fall for his ruse will be punished at the end of times.
The Antichrist is usually depicted as Christ’s opposite in every way. Whereas Jesus is the epitome of a good, moral person, the Antichrist is “perfectly” evil.
Jesus, of course, is the son of God while the Antichrist is the son of the fallen angel Satan. Jesus’s mother, Mary was a virgin while the Antichrist’s mother will be a whore masquerading as a virgin. While Jesus tells only the holy truth, the Antichrist will be a deceiver. So, in a nutshell, Christ, but evil. Not a lot of nuance.
What makes the Antichrist particularly interesting, considering his growing importance to many modern conservative Christians is that he barely appears in the Bible. At all. For obvious reasons, he doesn’t appear in the Old Testament (no Jesus there), but he’s only mentioned directly around three times (and those are open to interpretation, or the translation you’re reading) over the course of the entire Bible.
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The Antichrist is only directly referred to in the letters of John, also known as the Johannine epistles. Specifically, he’s mentioned in I John 2.18-27, I John 4.1-6, and 2 John 7, which talk rather vaguely of the Antichrist being the opposite of Jesus and appearing just before the end of the world.
That’s it, three references, each of them only two sentences or so long. And it looks like these were written decades (if not centuries) after Jesus was crucified.
So how did he become such a pivotal figure? Well as so often happened in the early days of Christianity Bible scholars started reading into the Bible and making their interpretations and over the centuries these interpretations became “canon.”
In particular, these scholars found other biblical characters with negative descriptions like “deceiver,” the “abomination of desolation,” and “the son of perdition”. They then decided these passages were describing the Antichrist.
Lots of horror films and other bits of pop culture say that the Antichrist will bear the number 666. This is an excellent example of the Antichrist being inserted into parts of the Bible where he wasn’t originally mentioned.
Revelations (the more-weird-than-usual bit of the Bible where the world ends) features a single, dreadful figure who is both “the beast from the earth” and “the beast from the sea” who carries on his skin the number 666. It never says this figure is the Antichrist, but early Christian scholars decided it was. The number has stuck ever since.
He’s All Over the Place
Over the centuries it became a frequent practice for religious leaders to start calling anyone they didn’t like the Antichrist. This practice seems to have started, or at least gained popularity, with the Benedictine monk Adso of Montier-en-Der around the year 1000 AD. It was he who gave us the main outline of the Antichrist as we understand him today.
This outline is also extremely antisemitic. In his thesis, the monk stated how the Antichrist would be a Jew from the tribe of Dan, born in Babylon.
According to him the Antichrist will be raised by Jewish witches and wizards and will be accepted as the Messiah by the Jews of Jerusalem. They’ll then go about through deception and force converting Christians to Judaism, killing those who refuse.
By 1400 AD Christians had begun targeting specific people, rather than entire races, who they didn’t like. John Wycliffe, the 14th-century English theologian and radical religious reformer is a classic example.
Wycliffe had serious issues with the Catholic church and what he saw as a corrupt and overly powerful Papacy. He and his followers, the Lombards, floated the idea that the Antichrist had infiltrated the Church and become the papacy itself. According to Wycliffe, it was possible that all the Popes were in fact the Antichrist.
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When the Reformation cropped up roughly 200 years later the Protestants took this idea and ran with it. Martin Luther genuinely believed he was living through the end of days and was convinced the Pope ticked all the boxes for being the Antichrist, declaring, “is the true end times Antichrist who has raised himself over and set himself against Christ.”
In modern times accusations of people being the Antichrist have multiplied exponentially. Anyone and anything conservative Christians don’t like tends to be labeled with the term.
The conservative religious right in the US has labeled several American presidents including Reagan, JFK, and most recently Obama and Biden as being the Antichrist. On the other side of the political aisle, while Donald Trump has a surprising amount of popularity with evangelicals, some American theologians and ethics scholars like D. Stephen Long have suggested he fits the bill.
Throughout history, other controversial figures such as Napoleon and Hitler have been put forward as candidates for being the Antichrist. In more recent times Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have been accused of being the Antichrist for obvious reasons. Their deaths put these accusations to bed, however.
These days the term Antichrist has become co-opted as a shorthand for evil and people claim to see him everywhere, panicking when they see the number 666 in things as mundane as barcodes and pet microchips. To them, this is evidence that the Antichrist has infiltrated every facet of our daily lives.
This has happened because throughout history certain figures have realized repeatedly that power can be gained by separating people. Over and over again people claiming to have religious authority have used the term Antichrist to single and demonize what they don’t like, whether it be a race, a political rival, or certain elements of modern pop culture. Rock music? The devil did it. Rap music? That’s the devil. Liberal Hollywood? Gay Marriage? The list goes on.
This overuse of the word is equally farcical and dangerous. As much as many of us have learned to ignore these allegations, some still take them at face value.
The term Antichrist was created to remind early Christians of the insidious nature of evil and the importance of fighting it. That’s a lesson that no matter one’s personal religious beliefs is more important than ever.
Top Image: The Antichrist, the dark counterpart to Jesus, is based on surprisingly little scriptural evidence. Source: JoelMasson / Adobe Stock.
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