Antichrist

The number was never really the point, though it is the part everyone remembers. Six hundred sixty-six, set down in the thirteenth chapter of Revelation, has outlived every ruler it might once have counted. Some early readers heard the name of Nero in it, the emperor who had burned Christians as lamps for his gardens, and the arithmetic fit if you spelled his title out in Hebrew letters. But the number pointed past any single tyrant toward a man who had not yet been born, a figure who would arrive wearing the exact shape of salvation and mean its opposite.

The word itself is blunt. Antichrist means against Christ, or in the place of Christ, and both senses were intended. It surfaces only in the letters of John, written near the close of the first century, and even there it arrives already familiar, as though the writer expected no explanation to be needed. John draws a distinction that would echo for two thousand years. There is the Antichrist who is still coming, and there are the many antichrists already loose in the world, ordinary deceivers and deniers doing the larger figure’s work in advance. It was a useful idea. It let believers brand their enemies without having to claim the end had finally arrived.

He was assembled, not invented whole. The oldest material comes from the Book of Daniel, composed around 167 BCE under the boot of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Greek king who set a pagan altar in the Jerusalem Temple and outlawed the practice of Judaism. Daniel described a final persecutor who would speak great words against the Most High and think to change the sacred times and laws, and because the king was never named in the text, every later age could find its own oppressor in the verse. Paul gave the figure more flesh in his second letter to the Thessalonians, calling him the man of lawlessness and the son of perdition, a deceiver who would seat himself in the temple of God and proclaim himself divine. The pieces lay scattered across centuries and several books. Nobody had yet stitched them into a single life.

That work fell to a monk. Around the year 954, Adso of Montier-en-Der wrote a letter to Queen Gerberga of France laying out the Antichrist’s biography in the calm, orderly manner of a saint’s life, except that every detail ran backward. Christ was born of a virgin through the Holy Spirit; the Antichrist would be born of a whore, filled with the devil while still in the womb. Christ came from the tribe of Judah and the town of Bethlehem; the Antichrist would come from the tribe of Dan, the serpent in the road of Genesis, and from the city of Babylon. He would grow up in obscurity, gather magicians and false teachers, and begin his public work at thirty, the same age at which Christ had begun his. The symmetry was the horror. Adso’s letter became the standard reference for the next five hundred years, copied into well over a hundred manuscripts and folded into the popular collections of legend.

His reign, when it came, would last three and a half years. He would enter Jerusalem in triumph and be welcomed where Christ had been condemned, rebuild the Temple, and take his seat on the throne of Solomon. The miracles would follow, and the crowds would not be able to tell them from the real thing: fire called down out of the sky, the sick made whole, the dead apparently raised, all of it conjured and false. He would convert the kings of the earth, lavish wealth on those who knelt, and turn on those who would not. Two figures were expected to stand against him. Enoch and Elijah, the two men Scripture says were taken up to heaven without dying, would return to preach against the deceiver and steady the faithful, and he would have them killed in the street. Then his time would simply run out.

The defeat is almost offhand in the telling. After all the terror, Christ destroys him with the breath of his mouth and the brightness of his coming, in Paul’s phrase, and the world ends shortly after in the Last Judgment. There is no final duel, no even contest. The whole structure of the Antichrist’s power, the signs and the conversions and the rebuilt Temple, collapses the instant the genuine article appears.

What he looks like is a stranger question than it sounds. Christian tradition gives him no settled face, and that absence is the point. He passes as a man, a teacher, a king, and the deception works precisely because nothing about him announces what he is. Islam developed the same end-times deceiver in far sharper physical detail. There he is the Dajjal, the lying messiah, a short heavyset man with thick curling hair and a ruddy face, blind or clouded in one eye that bulges like a floating grape, the Arabic letters for unbelief standing on his forehead for those with the faith to read them. He rides out of the east, works his wonders, and is finally cut down when Jesus returns to break him. The two figures share a spine even where their faces differ.

The figure never stayed put. Because John had loosed the many antichrists into the present, the name could always be thrown at a living enemy, and it was, constantly. Nero, Muhammad, and Saladin were each named in turn; the emperor Frederick II and Pope John XXII after them; the tsar Peter the Great by the Old Believers who hated him; in the last century, Mussolini, for trying to raise the Roman Empire from the dead. The Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore rebuilt the whole scheme around a succession of persecutors mounting toward the worst of all. Martin Luther made the most consequential move by deciding the Antichrist was not a man at all but an institution, the papacy itself, a collective body of evil rather than a single one. His power, in the end, was never really strength. It was counterfeit, the ability to look exactly like the thing it opposed, and that was also the whole of its weakness. Strip away the imitation and nothing stands underneath. The deceiver can only borrow a shape. He cannot hold it once the original comes back.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Antichrist?

The Antichrist is the ultimate enemy of Christ in Christian tradition, a false messiah who will appear before the Last Judgment to deceive the world and persecute the faithful. The term comes from the letters of John, where it means both “against Christ” and “in place of Christ.” His entire identity is built as a deliberate parody of Jesus, mimicking the form of salvation while delivering its opposite.

Where does the Antichrist come from?

According to the standard medieval account written by the monk Adso of Montier-en-Der around 954, the Antichrist will be born in the city of Babylon, into the Jewish tribe of Dan rather than the tribe of Judah that produced Christ. He is said to be conceived by a corrupt woman and filled with the devil from the womb, then raised in obscurity before beginning his public ministry at the age of thirty.

What is the number 666 and is it the Antichrist’s name?

The number 666, from Revelation 13:18, is the “number of the beast” and has long been read as a coded reference to the Antichrist or his beastly form. Using Hebrew gematria, where letters carry numerical values, the figure most commonly resolves to “Nero Caesar,” the Roman emperor who persecuted early Christians. Some early manuscripts give the number as 616 instead, which also fits a spelling of Nero’s name.

Is the Antichrist the same as the Devil?

No, the Antichrist is not Satan himself but a human agent through whom Satan works. Christian tradition describes him as a man “full of the devil,” empowered to perform false miracles and deceive the nations, while the Devil remains the spiritual force behind him. Martin Luther broke with this by arguing the Antichrist was not an individual at all but an institution, the papacy.

How is the Antichrist defeated?

The Antichrist is destroyed by Christ at the end of his three-and-a-half-year reign, killed, in Paul’s phrasing, “with the breath of his mouth” and “the brightness of his coming.” There is no drawn-out battle; his counterfeit power collapses the moment the true Christ returns, and the Last Judgment and the end of the world follow shortly after.

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