Is the Antichrist in the book of Revelation?

Where the word actually is

The Greek antichristos appears in just four verses of the New Testament, all in two short letters traditionally credited to John. The first comes with a surprise.

Little children, these are the end times, and as you heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have arisen. By this we know that it is the final hour.

Many antichrists, already. The writer’s next words explain who they are: “They went out from us, but they didn’t belong to us” (1 John 2:19). His antichrists are people who left his own community, teaching that Jesus was not the Christ, or had not really “come in the flesh” (1 John 2:22; 4:3). The second letter says it in one line.

For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who don’t confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the Antichrist.

Here antichrist is less a single villain at the end of time than a teaching, and a present danger: “Now it is in the world already” (1 John 4:3). The Greek prefix anti can mean against, but also in place of. An antichrist is a rival, a counterfeit Christ.

What Revelation has instead

Revelation never uses the word. Its enemies have other names. There is the great dragon, “the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan” (Revelation 12:9). There is a beast from the sea, which the world worships, and whose number is 666. And there is a second beast from the land, which the book later calls “the false prophet” (Revelation 16:13; 19:20).

The counterfeit idea is there, though, in pictures. The Lamb of Revelation stands “as though it had been slain” (5:6); the sea beast has a head that “looked like it had been wounded fatally,” and was healed (13:3). The land beast “had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon” (13:11). Many readers call the three an unholy trinity, a parody of the real one.

How one Antichrist was built

Christian writers soon joined passages the Bible keeps apart. Paul warned the Thessalonians of “the man of sin,” who “sits as God in the temple of God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4). Daniel saw a little horn with “a mouth speaking arrogantly” (Daniel 7:8). Jesus spoke of “false christs and false prophets” (Mark 13:22). Around 180, Irenaeus of Lyon read all of these together with Revelation and gave the Antichrist a biography: he would come from the tribe of Dan, which is missing from Revelation’s list of tribes in chapter 7 (Against Heresies 5.30.2). Hippolytus wrote a whole treatise, On Christ and Antichrist, about 200. Around 950 the monk Adso of Montier-en-Der wrote a life of the Antichrist for Queen Gerberga of the West Franks, and the Middle Ages took it from there.

Who people said he was

Every age has had candidates. In the Reformation, Luther and many Protestants named the papacy, and the Westminster Confession of 1646 called the pope “that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition.” Many evangelicals today expect a single world ruler before Christ’s return, and the Catholic Catechism speaks of the Antichrist as the supreme religious deception (paragraph 675). Others read the word the way the letters of John use it, for any denial of who Jesus was, in any century. Herald tells the text: in Revelation there is a dragon and two beasts, and no one by that name.