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  • 2008-04-23 (xsd:date)
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  • Is Barack Obama the Anti-Christ? (en)
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  • Revelation (the final book of the New Testament) and Nostradamus' Prophecies are two all-purpose befuddling works. If you want to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt (or simply yank people's chains), simply claim that some prominent person or recent event corresponds to descriptions that presage the end of the world, as elaborated by Revelation or Nostradamus. After all, comparatively few people have read either of those works; most people just have some vague idea that they describe, in detail, a coming apocalypse and the signs that will herald its imminent arrival. So pick your target, make up a list of reasons to explain how it supposedly matches up with end-of-the-world predictions, and watch the process of bewilderment begin. (We saw this happen in spades with bogus Nostradamus prophecies immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.) The item quoted above, linking presidential candidate Barack Obama with the figure of the anti-Christ, is more of the same type of denigrative fiction. Contrary to popular belief, the New Testament book of Revelation (not Revelations, as it is commonly rendered) does not provide a laundry list of signs for identifying the appearance of an anti-Christ. In fact, it neither uses the term anti-Christ nor describes such a figure; Chapter 13 of that book merely recounts the appearance of beasts, who are depicted in animalistic terms (as rendered in the King James version of the Bible): The term anti-Christ is mentioned several times in the first and second letters of John, but none of those passages specifically describes or identifies the anti-Christ figure (other than as a denier of the divinity of Jesus): Nothing in the Bible, in Revelation or elsewhere, describes the anti-Christ as being a man, in his 40s, of Muslim descent. In fact, since the book of Revelation was complete by the end of the second century, yet the religion of Islam wasn't founded until about four hundred years later, the notion that Revelation would have mentioned a Muslim at all is rather far-fetched. (And even if it did, it couldn't be construed as a reference to Barack Obama, since he isn't a Muslim.) A July 2009 video purportedly demonstrating how Jesus revealed the name of the anti-Christ to be Barack Obama was publicized by the disreputable WND web site: Salon pointed out some of the questionable linguistic manipulations employed in the video and noted that: The Biblical citation most relevant to this issue might not be one from Revelation, but rather this passage from the Gospel of Matthew: Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. (en)
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