Antichrist, a name which occurs only in the epistles of St John, and is identified by different writers with more or less probability with false Christs, and other enemies of Christianity. The Greek preposition anti has the twofold meaning of substitution and of opposition; and the two meanings of a rival of Christ or pretender to the Messiahship, and an opponent, are mixed up in the early Christian conceptions of antichrist, in which various stages of development are to be distinguished.
(1) The 'false Christs,' whose appearance was predicted by Jesus as to precede the coming of the Son of Man (Matt. xxiv.), were pretenders whose success would depend on their acting in harmony with the popular expectations regarding the Messiah, but showing no special opposition to the Gospel. There is nothing peculiar to Christianity in this idea, for a number of pretenders to the Messiahship appeared among the Jews, both before and after the time of Christ. The other idea of opposition on the part of an antimesiah was also a familiar one (cf. 1 John, ii. 18). Its earliest form in Jewish thought is probably that of a warrior-king, Gog (Ez. xxxviii.). To this were subsequently added, by the rabbinical imagination, features borrowed not only from Antiochus Epiphanes, who is depicted in the book of Daniel (ii. viii. xi.), and who was regarded as the type of enmity against the kingdom of God, but from all the Old Testament enemies of Israel—Balaam, Goliath, &c.—and even from oriental myths and traditions; all combined and personified under the name 'Armillus.' In reference to the after-development of the Christian conception, it is to be noticed that the false Christs of Matt. xxiv. are Jews, who by their pretensions are to bring trouble upon their nation.
(2) The development of this conception is apparent in the epistles of St Paul, inasmuch as the element of hostility to the Gospel is distinctly present. The apostle to the Gentiles had to bear the brunt of Jewish opposition (cf. 1 Thess. ii. 15), and the 'Man of Sin,' in whom this opposition came to a head, can only be a Jew, since he regards the temple at Jerusalem as the seat of God's worship
(2 Thess. ii. 3, 4); whilst the Roman power, by which he had repeatedly been delivered from the fanaticism of his countrymen, would appear to be the hindrance by which Jewish enmity was held in check, till the time appointed for its complete manifestation (2 Thess. ii. 7, 8). The idea of a false Christ was also blended with that of a spiritual antichrist (see 4 below). Whether as the hero of the Jewish revolution, or as false teachers, the 'Man of Sin' was a mere human representative of Satan, the instigator of all wickedness (2 Thess. ii. 9; cf. 2 Cor. vi. 14, 15).
(3) In the third stage, which is represented in the Apocalypse, antichrist is identified with heathenism. Till the time of Nero, the Christians had never come into direct collision with the Roman power; but by them, as well as by Jews, the Roman empire was now regarded as the fourth kingdom of Daniel's vision (ii.). Caligula, by ordering his image to be set up in the Holy of Holies, had repeated 'the abomination of desolation' (Matt. xxiv. 15; Dan. xii. 11), and proved himself the antitype of Antiochus. And when Nero, after the burning of Rome, made a scapegoat of the Christians, so that they were subjected to all the tortures that a fiendish ingenuity could devise, it was only natural that this monster of cruelty and vice should appear to them the incarnation of wickedness, the antichrist, a wild beast out of the bottomless pit (Rev. xi. 7, xii. 3, xiii. 1-6). The popular belief that Nero would re-appear from the East after his death, whether expressed in Rev. xvii. 8 or not, was probably due to the supposed parallel between Christ and antichrist; the return of the one required the return of the other. The names to which the number of the Beast (666, Rev. xiii. 18) has been found to apply, from the end of the 1st century to the present day, are innumerable (see Schaff's History of the Christian Church). That of Nero has always been in the list, but it is quite a recent discovery, made by several scholars independently and almost universally accepted, that his name answers to it exactly in Hebrew characters; although even thus the necessary application to Nero is disputed in one of the latest and best orthodox interpretations of the Apocalypse (Milligan, Baird Lecture, 1886). See APOCALYPTIC NUMBER. In recent times Mohammed, the Grand Turk, Napoleon I., and Napoleon III., have all been identified with antichrist.
(4) A fourth phase of the New Testament conception of antichrist appears in the Epistles of St John, in which the name first occurs (1 John, ii. 18). Antichrist was a spirit animating certain teachers within the church itself. Indeed, just as in the general aspect of the Pauline conception, the real antichrist is Satan, whose representatives the false teachers are; it is they who are the teachers of error, the ministers of the god of this world; the conflict is between truth and error, light and darkness, Christ and Belial (1 John, ii. 19, iv. 1-6). Many of the Reformers treated the pope as antichrist; and in the Schmalkalld articles, the identification, long held to by many Protestants, became a part of Lutheran doctrine.
See Davidson's Introduction to the New Testament (1868); Renan's L'Antichrist (1873); Philippi's Die Kirchliche und Biblische Lehre vom Antichrist (1877); Farrar's Early Days of Christianity (1884); Bousset, Der Antichrist (1895; trans. by A. H. Keane, 1896).