The Adversary at the End of the Age

The Antichrist is Christian eschatology's image of a final, personal embodiment of opposition to Christ, the great deceiver expected to appear before the end of the age and gather the world under a false and blasphemous rule. The concept is assembled from scattered scriptural materials rather than set out in one place: the "man of lawlessness" of 2 Thessalonians who exalts himself in the temple; the "beast" of Revelation with its mark and its number; the deceiving "little horn" of Daniel; and the warnings in the Johannine epistles, the only texts actually to use the word antichristos, that "many antichrists" have already come, denying that Jesus is the Christ.

From these strands Christian tradition wove a composite figure: a coming individual empowered by Satan, who will perform false signs, demand worship, persecute the faithful, and be destroyed at Christ's return. The idea has had a turbulent history of application, reformers and their opponents branded one another and the papacy "Antichrist," and popular movements have repeatedly identified contemporary rulers with him, which is precisely its danger and its power. Theologically it expresses the conviction that history moves toward a final concentration of evil that precedes, and is overcome by, the return of Christ.