Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
The man of lawlessness
An end-times figure Paul describes and refuses to explain.
2 Thessalonians 2:3-12, in every translation this tool compares.
Paul describes an end-times figure, says his readers already know what is holding him back, and never says what that is. Nobody since has settled it. The word antichrist, which people reach for here, is not Paul's word and is not in this passage.
Paul says his readers know what restrains him and doesn't say what it is, and nobody since has been able to say for certain. DDD (L. J. Lietaert Peerbolte) keeps one point straight: the word "antichrist" occurs only in the Johannine letters (1 John 2:18,22; 4:3; 2 John 7), never in 2 Thessalonians or Revelation, and the developed tradition of a single Antichrist familiar from later Christian writing isn't attested in full before Irenaeus, around AD 180. Paul's man of lawlessness is better described as a future anti-God figure than as the Antichrist of the later technical sense. John's letters use the word for the spirit of the writer's present opponents, already active and plural ("many antichrists have come," 1 John 2:18), not for one end-time individual, and 2 Thessalonians uses the Lawless One's still-future coming to argue that the end hasn't arrived, the opposite point from the one John and Revelation make with their villains. DDD also flags the Qumran pairing of Melchizedek and Melchiresha (4Q280-282; 4QAmram) as the nearest structural parallel outside the New Testament to a christ and antichrist typology.
Who he is and what holds him back. Paul names neither, and nobody since has settled the restrainer. DDD separates Paul's figure from the later Antichrist tradition, which is not attested in full before Irenaeus, and from John's antichrists, who are already present and plural. Reading the three as one figure is a later synthesis.
- 2 Thessalonians 2:3-12
- 1 John 2:18,22
- 1 John 4:3
- 2 John 7
- L. J. Lietaert Peerbolte, DDD s.v. "Antichrist," 62
