When Trump held his Nazi-revival meeting at Madison Square Garden last week, one of the vile warm-up acts called Vice President Kamala Harris the Antichrist.
Unlike Trump and the majority of his followers I have actually read the Christian Scriptures--in the language they were written in. If you haven't you may not know that the Antichrist is mentioned just twice in the entire 27 books that comprise the Christian Scriptures. Both mentions are the letters the Apostle John sent to new Churches during his lifetime. In another letter (2 Thessalonians) there is a reference to a "man of lawlessness" and the "beast" of Revelation that are taken to be the Antichrist, but the references are ambiguous.
More importantly, the prefix anti in Greek has multiple meanings. In can mean against or in opposition it can also mean equality or correspondence as in antitype.
But if we take Antichrist as in opposition to Christ, the context of both letters is to men acting against the Church at the time the letters were written.
But for those besotted with prophecy, identifying the Antichrist has been a source of endless vain speculation for two millennia. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins wrote the bestselling Christian-market novel series in history in the 1990s turning a very bad interpretation of Bible prophecy into the Left Behind novels.
In the first of the seven novels the Antichrist is identified as the Secretary General of United Nations. Maybe the LaHaye and Jenkins had Kofi Annan in mind or Boutros Boutros Ghali. They did not get their supervillain from the actual citations in 1 John or 2 John. They were using the Beast of Revelation.
Novelists can and do "make shit up" but their readers took as "gospel" their wacky reading of Christian Scripture. If you wonder how Donald Trump became King Cyrus of Persia in the minds of prophecy obsessed Christians, the sales of Left Behind (upwards of 50 million copies) shows a very plausible path.
Neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor the Secretary General of the United Nations is anything like the actual references to the Antichrist in the letters of John. The best candidate for that office in modern America is the proud commandment breaker Donald Trump.
Totally, agree…if one wishes to advance the myth, one might see greater commonality between Trump and the great deceiver!
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