Who is the Antichrist? What the Bible really says, as Peter Thiel and JD Vance bring the word back

What John says

These are the only verses in the Bible that use the word: 1 John 2:18, 2:22, 4:3 and 2 John 7. Here is the main passage:

¹⁸ Children, it is the last hour; and just as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. This is how we know it is the last hour. ¹⁹ They went out from us, but they did not belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their departure made it clear that none of them belonged to us. ²⁰ You, however, have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. ²¹ I have not written to you because you lack knowledge of the truth, but because you have it, and because no lie comes from the truth. ²² Who is the liar, if it is not the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, who denies the Father and the Son. ²³ Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father, but whoever confesses the Son has the Father as well.

Three things stand out. John’s readers already expected someone: “you have heard that the antichrist is coming.” John does not deny it, but he turns their attention to the present: “so now many antichrists have appeared.” And the people he means are not emperors. “They went out from us.” They had been in the church. Their fault is what they say about Jesus, and his test is a confession: the antichrist “denies the Father and the Son.” In chapter 4 he speaks of “the spirit of the antichrist” which is “already in the world at this time” (1 John 4:3), and in his second letter he says that anyone “refusing to confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” is “the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 John 7).

Paul’s man of lawlessness

Paul never says “antichrist,” but he does describe a person. The Thessalonians had been told that the Day of the Lord had already come, and he answers:

³ Let no one deceive you in any way, for it will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness — the son of destruction — is revealed. ⁴ He will oppose and exalt himself above every so-called god or object of worship. So he will seat himself in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. ⁵ Do you not remember that I told you these things while I was still with you? ⁶ And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. ⁷ For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but the one who now restrains it will continue until he is taken out of the way. ⁸ And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of His mouth and annihilate by the majesty of His arrival.

This is the strongest text for a single figure at the end: he is “revealed,” he claims to be God, and Jesus destroys him at his coming. His power is “every kind of power, sign, and false wonder” (2 Thessalonians 2:9). Note too that “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.” Paul, like John, sees it in his own day.

Thiel’s lectures have also made a Greek word fashionable, katechon, “the restrainer.” It comes from these verses, where Paul writes of “what is now restraining him” and “the one who now restrains it.” His first readers knew what he meant: “you know,” he says. We do not. Augustine, writing in the fifth century, surveyed the guesses and said plainly: “I frankly confess I do not know what he means” (City of God XX.19). Anyone who tells you which government or president is the restrainer knows more than Augustine admitted to knowing, and more than the text says.

Now the phrase Thiel’s case rests on. Here is the verse: “While people are saying, ‘Peace and security,’ destruction will come upon them suddenly” (1 Thessalonians 5:3). The older King James wording is “peace and safety.” The verse is in a different letter from the man of lawlessness and in a passage about the Day of the Lord coming “like a thief in the night” (5:2). It does not mention a leader, a slogan of a coming ruler, or a government. Most readers take Paul to mean people who feel secure and are not ready. Many scholars hear a jab at Roman propaganda of his own day, though others doubt the phrase was a Roman slogan; either way it points to no future ruler. The Catholic Catechism does cite the verse among the texts on the Church’s final trial, and Irenaeus applied it to the Antichrist in the second century (Against Heresies V.30.2), so linking the two is not new. But it is a link readers make; the verse does not make it.

The beast and 666

When most people picture the Antichrist, they are picturing Revelation 13, and the word is not there. John sees a beast from the sea with “authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation” (13:7), and a second beast with “two horns like a lamb” which “spoke like a dragon” (13:11). The second makes people take a mark “so that no one could buy or sell” without it (13:17). This is the text Thiel himself uses. In recordings quoted by The Verge he says Revelation “tells us, sort of, the Antichrist will abolish financial freedom,” citing 13:16–17. But the chapter does not call the beast the Antichrist, and its issue is worship: “all who dwell on the earth will worship the beast” (13:8). We read the mark as a badge of who you bow to, not a forecast of financial regulation. Others read it differently: Britannica notes a view that links it to Nero’s image on coins.

Then comes the number: “it is the number of a man, and that number is 666” (13:18). Britannica reports that the most common reading adds up the Hebrew letters of “Nero Caesar,” and that a variant, 616, fits a spelling without the second n. Its premises are disputed, and other readers take the number as symbolic. Irenaeus, in the second century, listed names that fit the number but would not commit to any: it is “more certain, and less hazardous, to await the fulfilment of the prophecy” (Against Heresies V.30.3).

Behind Revelation stands Daniel, with its little horn that speaks “words of arrogance” (Daniel 7:8) and will “oppress the saints of the Most High” (7:25). Jesus warns of “false Christs and false prophets” who “perform great signs and wonders to deceive even the elect, if that were possible” (Matthew 24:24). Notice the plural again.

What the Bible does not say

It does not say the Antichrist is the beast. No verse uses the word for a ruler. The figures later readers join to him come closer: Daniel’s horn is a king, and Revelation’s beast has worldwide authority and a following. But nothing gives an age of 33, or says he will found a world government through regulation, though both appear in modern accounts of him. It does not say he opposes science or technology, or that he supports them. It does not say which side of any modern argument he will take. And it gives no date: “No one knows about that day or hour” (Matthew 24:36), and “it is not for you to know times or seasons” (Acts 1:7).

How Christians differ

Early Church. The idea of a single end-time deceiver is very old. Hippolytus wrote a whole treatise, On Christ and Antichrist, around the year 200, teaching that “the deceiver seeks to liken himself in all things to the Son of God” (section 6). Augustine reports that some in his day took Paul’s “mystery of iniquity” to allude to Nero, and he adds that it is “uncertain in what temple he shall sit,” mentioning a reading in which the temple means the Church.

Catholic. The Catechism (no. 675) speaks of a final trial for the Church and of “the supreme religious deception” of the Antichrist, “a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.” In this telling the danger is a false religious answer to human problems, at the price of the truth. The next paragraph (676) names a political form of it, “secular messianism,” not a person. Gibson argues that Thiel misreads Pope Benedict XVI, whose writing on the apocalypse, he says, concerns the future of the Church and is not a countdown.

Eastern Orthodox. John of Damascus, a Father honoured in East and West, keeps both senses: everyone who does not confess the Son of God come in the flesh “is Antichrist,” and there is also one to come who “becomes man as the offspring of fornication and receives all the energy of Satan” (Exposition of the Orthodox Faith IV.26).

Lutheran and Reformed, historically. The Reformers said the Antichrist had already come, and that he was the papacy. Luther’s Smalcald Articles (1537) call the pope “the very Antichrist” (Part II, Article IV), and the original Westminster Confession (25.6) calls him “that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition.” The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland keeps the clause in its official text. American Presbyterian versions, such as that of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, no longer have the clause. Catholics reject the charge entirely.

Evangelical, dispensational. This is the view many people now take for granted, spread by the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 and later end-times books. It expects one future person. PBS’s Frontline glossary, summing up Christian end-times scenarios generally, says the Antichrist “will forge a one-world government through promises of peace,” until Jesus defeats him at Armageddon. Thiel’s version is new in its targets, but as Gibson says, the frame is familiar.

Preterist and symbolic readings. Others, in several traditions, read Revelation’s beast mainly as first-century Rome and Nero, written for Christians who were suffering under it, or as a symbol of every empire that demands worship.

These are summaries in general terms, not statements by any church about the people in the news.

Our take

This is our opinion, not a report. The Bible’s antichrist is a test you apply to what is preached about Jesus, not a label you pin on the people who frighten you, and Thiel’s use of “peace and safety” gets Paul wrong.

We do think Paul expected one final figure. Read plainly, 2 Thessalonians 2 is about a person, and we think the many antichrists are the forerunners of that one. So we are not with those who dissolve the whole thing into a symbol. But we think the order in John matters. He was writing to people who had heard the Antichrist was coming, and he said: look at who has walked out of your own congregation, and what they say about Jesus.

Now try Thiel’s test beside John’s. Thiel’s, as reported, looks for someone who uses fear of catastrophe to promise safety through global rule, including rules on technology. John’s looks for someone who denies that Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh. There is no verse that links the first to the second. A person can be wrong about AI rules, or right about them, and it tells you nothing in John’s terms. We are not saying that Thiel means harm or that his worry about world government has no merit as politics; that is a separate argument, to be had on its merits. Our objection is to giving a policy view the authority of the book of Revelation.

History should make everyone humble here. Christians have pointed at Nero and at popes, and now some point at climate campaigners. Many were sure. In our view no name has held up: none has won agreement among Christians, and every claim tied to a date has failed. A list that always seems to hold the speaker’s opponents should make us suspicious. Greta Thunberg is a climate campaigner and Bill Gates is a philanthropist and businessman; whatever you think of them, nothing in Scripture applies the word to either.

The uncomfortable part is John’s own. His antichrists came from inside. So the better question for a Christian is not who the Antichrist is, but who is teaching a Jesus who asks nothing, or a Jesus who happens to vote the way we do, and whether we are listening. On that much, Vance’s “I don’t know” is the most biblical line in the whole story. It fits what Jesus said about the date: no one knows.

Over to you

Which has shaped your picture of the Antichrist more: the Bible itself, a preacher, or a novel or film, and did reading the verses above change it? Tell us below.

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