The Bible's Antichrist appears only in two short letters
The word antichrist shows up in the New Testament only in the letters of John, and there it seems to describe many people, not one villain: anyone who denies that Jesus is the Christ. The single end-times figure of popular imagination was assembled later, from scattered passages that never use the word.
The Greek antikhristos joins anti with Christos, the anointed one, and anti can mean in place of as well as against, which fits the idea of a false saviour. John's letters tell readers that many antichrists have already come, a sign of the last hour. Scholars dispute whether the New Testament describes an individual at all. The concept does not appear in Jewish writing from 500 BC to 50 AD, and the historian Bernard McGinn has suggested it grew from Jews under unpredictable Seleucid or Roman rule wanting a more human embodiment of evil than the heavenly accuser Satan.
The individual figure was built from other texts. Jesus in Matthew and Mark warns of false messiahs working signs and wonders. Daniel's vision has a little horn, Revelation a beast rising from the sea, and Paul's second letter to the Thessalonians a lawless one who will enthrone himself in God's temple, held back for now by a mysterious restrainer.
Early Christian writers filled in details. Polycarp, around the early 2nd century, still used the word for anyone teaching false doctrine. Irenaeus tried decoding 666 into names such as Lateinos, pointing at Rome, and he and Hippolytus predicted the Antichrist would come from the tribe of Dan. Tertullian identified the restrainer as the Roman Empire itself, whose break-up into ten kingdoms would clear the way. Cyril of Jerusalem gave him a reign of three and a half years, and Martin of Tours, expecting the end before 400, was sure he had already been born. John Chrysostom, by contrast, told Christians to stop speculating.
Later centuries kept reapplying the label. Luther, Calvin and Knox identified the papacy itself as the Antichrist, a present reality rather than a future person, while Catholic and Orthodox traditions generally expect a future deceiver. Judaism and Islam have parallel figures, Armilus and al-Masih ad-Dajjal.
Source: Antichrist
