The Secret History of the Antichrist

Pay­Pal co-founder Peter Thiel has spo­ken pub­licly on a vari­ety of issues from con­trar­i­an entre­pre­neur­ship to tech­ni­cal stag­na­tion to geopo­lit­i­cal strug­gle. Late­ly, he’s drawn more atten­tion with extend­ed remarks on what would seem an unex­pect­ed sub­ject: the Antichrist, a seem­ing­ly enlight­ened but decep­tive­ly malev­o­lent fig­ure or move­ment bent on putting the world under inno­va­tion-sti­fling uni­fied con­trol. The term itself may sound famil­iar, though many of us haven’t seen it ref­er­enced much in pop­u­lar cul­ture since the hey­day of the Left Behind nov­el series that sold so well around the turn of the mil­len­ni­um. Whether or not it’s to your lit­er­ary taste, that apoc­a­lypse nar­ra­tive’s vil­lain does adhere to the Antichrist arche­type laid out in the Bible.

In the new Hochela­ga video above, Tom­mie Trelawny goes back to the bib­li­cal texts to deter­mine the ori­gins of the Antichrist, whom human­i­ty has por­trayed as “a great deceiv­er who charms the world through false mir­a­cles, and with it, demands to be wor­shiped as god him­self.” How­ev­er large he looms in mod­ern Chris­t­ian sto­ry­telling, he’s ref­er­enced in only four pas­sages of the Bible. The word Antichrist appears nowhere but in one of John’s epis­tles, which also warns that “even now many antichrists have come,” indi­cat­ing, as Trelawny puts it, those who reject “that Jesus is the Christ, or Mes­si­ah.” As John saw it, some such indi­vid­u­als — includ­ing mem­bers of new sects like Gnos­ti­cism — were also dan­ger­ous­ly charis­mat­ic, which aid­ed the spread of their false doc­trines.

The apos­tle Paul or one of his dis­ci­ples, in a let­ter to the Thes­sa­lo­ni­ans, fore­sees the rise of “a mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure known only as ‘the law­less one,’ who will gain pow­er by deceiv­ing peo­ple through false mir­a­cles, and once in pow­er, he will com­mit his great­est crime of all: ‘He will oppose and exalt him­self over every­thing that is called God or wor­shiped, so that he sets him­self up in God’s tem­ple, pro­claim­ing him­self to be God.” For its part, the Book of Rev­e­la­tion adds “the arrival of a mon­strous sev­en-head­ed beast,” and lat­er, a com­pan­ion with “the horns of a lamb but the voice of a drag­on.” There­after comes the “mark of the beast,” 666 — or per­haps 616, Trelawny adds, giv­en that either could be seen as code for Neron Kaisar in Greek or Nero Cae­sar in Latin, bet­ter known as the ancient Roman Emper­or Nero. Some sus­pect­ed him of being the Antichrist, espe­cial­ly if he orches­trat­ed Rome’s great fire in order to con­sol­i­date his pow­er and scape­goat the Chris­tians.

Trelawny also gets into detail about the twice-excom­mu­ni­cat­ed Holy Roman Emper­or Fred­er­ick II, whom Pope Gre­go­ry IX saw as the proph­e­sied “law­less one,” and even into the accu­sa­tions of being the Antichrist flung back and forth dur­ing the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion and the flur­ry of print­ed pam­phlets that drove its sur­round­ing con­tro­ver­sy. The lat­ter sto­ry “shows a sub­tle change tak­ing place in how peo­ple could under­stand the Antichrist. It was no longer just a sin­gle per­son; it could be an entire sys­tem or insti­tu­tion.” Through­out his­to­ry, as under­scored today by anony­mous online debates as well as lec­tures deliv­ered by Peter Thiel in Rome, “it seems that what­ev­er peo­ple fear the most, from com­mu­nism to glob­al­ism to reg­u­la­tion, the Antichrist can become.” If so, we’ll keep hear­ing about his immi­nent (or already accom­plished) rise until human­i­ty can get over its fears — and what a mir­a­cle that would be.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Sur­vival Guide to the Bib­li­cal Apoc­a­lypse

The Reli­gions of Bob Dylan: From Deliv­er­ing Evan­gel­i­cal Ser­mons to Singing Hava Nag­i­la With Har­ry Dean Stan­ton

It’s the End of the World as We Know It: The Apoc­a­lypse Gets Visu­al­ized in an Inven­tive Map from 1486

A Rare, Ear­ly Ver­sion of the King Arthur Leg­end Found & Trans­lat­ed

Par­adise Lost Explained: How John Mil­ton Wrote His Epic Reli­gious Poem from Satan’s Per­spec­tive

Mar­shall McLuhan Explains Why We’re Blind to How Tech­nol­o­gy Changes Us, Rais­ing the Ques­tion: What Have the Inter­net & Social Media Done to Us?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.