Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination With Evil

by Bernard McGinn

In this timely and sweeping exploration, one of the greatest living historians of Christian thought traces the concept of Antichrist from its Judeo-Christian origins to the present day. Rooted in Second Temple Judaism--a period of intense religious and political disruption--Antichrist developed out of belief in malevolent angelic and human forces. McGinn demonstrates how Antichrist has often reflected the human need to comprehend the persistence of evil in the world, and examines how it has haunted popular imagination in both the form of indivuduals--such as Nero, Napoleon, and Saddam Hussein--and groups--Jews, heretics, Muslims.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Christianity, Theology, 20th Century, Philosophy

369 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1994

About the author

Bernard McGinn, the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of mysticism in the Western Christian tradition. He has also written extensively on Jewish mysticism, the history of apocalyptic thought, and medieval Christianity.

A cum laude graduate of St. Joseph's Seminary and College in Yonkers, NY, he earned a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1963 and a PhD in history from Brandeis University in 1970. After teaching theology for a year at The Catholic University of America, he joined the Chicago faculty in 1969 as an instructor in theology and the history of Christianity and was appointed a full professor nine years later. Dr. McGinn was named to the Donnelley chair in 1992. He retired in 2003.

The recent recipient of a Mellon Foundation Emeritus Grant, he also has held a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship, an American Association of Theological Schools research award, two research fellowships for work at the Institute for Advanced Study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a research fellowship at the Institute for Ecumenical and Culture Research at St. John's University, and a Lily Foundation Senior Research Fellowship.

Dr. McGinn has delivered invited lectures at some one hundred colleges and universities in North America, Europe, and Israel. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Medieval Academy of America.  Past-president of the International Society for the Promotion of Eriugenean Studies, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association, he is member of the board of The Eckhart Society. He served as editor-in-chief of the Paulist Press series Classics of Western Spirituality and currently serves as a member of the editorial boards of Cistercian Publications, The Encyclopedia of World Spirituality, The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, and Spiritus.

Reviews

[Erick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bernard McGinn is one of the foremost scholarly authorities on Christian mysticism and apocalypticism. Given that I have a profound interest in both subjects, I’ve read quite a bit of him. This is the second time I’ve read this particular book. It is a good overview of the subject, and he provides a historical survey of the relevant literature, art, film, etc., having to do with the antichrist, and provides good commentary where necessary.

The term antichrist was often used throughout church history as a way of maligning opponents. McGinn rightly noted that the biblical concept devolved into a simple means of slandering opponents on religious grounds. That seems to have caused him to reject the idea of a literal antichrist, and into only accepting a rather nebulous personal antichrist. Church fathers like Origen and Augustine used the term antichrist as a means of Christian exhortation for individual Christians to search themselves and inquire whether they may be false Christians. McGinn endorses only this approach to this subject. While I don’t totally disagree with McGinn here, it is incredibly difficult to disregard the political aspect that the figure of the antichrist holds in the New Testament. No hermeneutical gymnastics could remove the very clear eschatological and political aspects of the antichrist in the New Testament. Jesus, Paul, and John appear to endorse the idea that antichrist isn’t just a spirit, but also an apocalyptic sign. It may be that the antichrist spirit is a demonic spirit (I hardly doubt that it is), but the political and eschatological aspects of it become clear when all the biblical evidence is weighed, and these can’t be foisted onto all Christians and still have the biblical concept of antichrist be fitting and appropriate.

Definitely a good book. McGinn has a wealth of knowledge regarding church history that aids him in giving a thorough survey of the subject. I disagree with his interpretation of antichrist at least in part. That being said, I also think the term has been misused variously throughout history. I feel the same way about how the concept of hell has been handled by individual Christians, but that doesn’t mean that I think it should be mutated into something that doesn’t align with the textual source from which it springs.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bernard McGinn, the great University of Chicago scholar of religion, has written extensively on Christian mysticism and apocalyptic spirituality. In Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil, he traces the history of Antichrist from its roots in pre-Christian Jewish apocalypticism to the current day, though the meat of the matter lies in the patristic and medieval eras. He does so with his customary clarity and erudition. Of course, the idea of Antichrist -- the idea of a human summation of evil that leads the world into the last days imagined in Daniel, Revelations, and the "Little Apocalypse" in the Synoptic Gospels -- is so closely tied to more general questions of eschatology and theodicy that at times Prof. McGinn struggles with the problem of what should or should not be included in his survey. Overall, though, this is a brilliant and readable treatment of a fascinating subject.

[Adam]

Bernard McGinn is a legend in the fields of the History of Christianity, Christian spirituality, and Christian mysticism. He's retired now from his position as a Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago, much to my chagrin. If I had to begin to list the amazing people I've missed out on studying with due to their retiring within the past five years, I'd run out of room.
This is his work on the phenomenon (literally, historically, religiously, socially, and otherwise) of Antichrist throughout history. I've barely begun this book, but its depth is immediately recognizable, as is McGinn's formidable arsenal of knowledge and wide-ranging academic familiarity.
This highly readable book fleshes out and explores the birth and perpetuation of the Antichrist theme throughout human history, beginning in early Christianity and moving on to the current day. With this being such a hot button of a topic among religious fundamentalists and those who love/abhor them, this book is both deeply engaging and guaranteed to draw peculiar stares if you're openly reading it on the bus, subway, or publically elsewhere.

[Alford Wayman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent overview of the idea of Anti-Christ and apocalypticism starting with early Hebrew literature, through Dead Sea Scrolls, and into the era of Roman Christianity,and concluding with evanglical apocalypticism in the late 1900's. Published in 1994, this book gave an overview of the many works in Jewish and Christian history that show the changes of the anti-christ theme, eschatology,and apocalyptic views in attempts to interpret both history and future. The book is rather short so it would be good for the reader to delve more into the actual texts that were mentioned, because McGinn left a clear trail of motifs and themes which resulted in the type of apocalypticism we have today. Some added, some took away, some redirected, some used it for political means, some for pessimism, and some for optimism. To pick up where McGinn left off I would personally recommend the book Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession by Robert C. Fuller. The book was dry history at times, but this text was not built for entertainment but for information. After seeing the early schools of though on the Anti-Christ it is amazing that certain streams can be found that the reader can follow back to their sources. And some of those sources did not start in the early Jesus communities as most assume.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book ages and ages ago. I don't remember why or when. Last year one of my reading resolutions was to read more of my religion books, which I absolutely failed to do. But it explains how this ended up finally on my to-read shelf when I was looking for a new non-fiction book to read.

So, this book tracks Christianity's changing views on the Antichrist, from Jewish pre-Christ apocalyptic writings to the present day. It's a sprawling history with a narrow focus, and I just am not familiar enough with Catholic history to get as much out of the book as I could have. Great swaths of the book felt very much like reading those stretches of The Name of the Rose dealing with different sects of the Catholic church, and all the names start to blur together and I'm straining to get anything meaningful out of it at all.

Which is not to say I didn't get anything out of it. It's easy to get mired in the mythos and worldview of your own time. Seeing how the ever-evolving understanding of evil, Antichrist, and end times both shaped and was shaped by the events and forces of history was good perspective on how we got to now.

A good reminder on why I set the goal of reading more books from my religion shelf in the first place.

[Michelle Skowronek · Rating 3 out of 5]

The one thing that really struck me most in this tome of antichrist history is how this apocalyptic image grew out of filtered and Romanized image of Jesus the Jew into Jesus the Demigod, then inverted, expanded, mythicized, drawn, personified, politicized and then slowly...splintered off into what the author calls "child's play." Antichrist has taken many forms and names, and now it seems that Antichrist is practically obsolete. Since before Jesus, humans have been predicting the apocalypse and coming of the embodiment of evil, changing dates around after the last assumed apocalyptic date came and went. Yet, by the 1700's Antichrist had lingered back to the shadows, unimportant, not so much a threat to us "modern" creatures. Funny how for thousands of years we exclaimed "there will be a bang, and it will be the end of all days!" Yet, antichrist did not arrive in a bang, antichrist flickered out like a light.

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a re-read of a book I had read right out of college. Still an interesting read and it somehow seems an appropriate time to revisit this topic, considering our current situation.

[Cole Baker · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Antichrist” by Bernard McGinn is a historical and theological work covering the story of the Antichrist. This book examines the origin of this “Final Enemy”, from its pre-Christian roots to the variety of literary depictions we see in the more modern day.

I’ll start by saying I am by no means a theological expert. I read the Bible when I was 11 or so, that’s it. That being said, I’ve done a bit of reading around the Middle Ages, specifically the time around the Black Plague (14th century). I had hoped my secular background would be enough.

It wasn’t! McGinn uses so much jargon my head was spinning. Honestly, this wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t the strange way that McGinn decides to choose these terms. For example, he outright defines apocalypse by it’s original meaning: a revelatory text. But then, he used the more modern meaning for the vast majority of the book.

In another example, McGinn uses the word millenarianism about 20 times. He defines it 5 different times, for reasons I cannot understand. Simultaneously, he will randomly throw in words in other languages without explanation. Why define the same term repeatedly yet refuse to define most others?

Frankly, I think this book is poorly put together from an academic standpoint. Maybe the book is for a more educated reader. But why is Beaty referenced 30 pages before he’s actually explained? Why do some figures have completely different captions compared to the sentence their cited? Why is there a table that isn’t referenced in the text at all? This makes for a confusing book even if you’re an expert. I expected more from an academic work.

Finally, I felt like some of the historical analysis was middling. McGinn describes the insane actions of Emperor Nero, a persecutor of Christians. However, Mary Beard’s work covered quite well that a lot of those prescriptions of madness were political propaganda at the time. If McGinn isn’t applying that viewpoint here, I distrust his reading of history elsewhere in the book.

I don’t want to say I hated the book. I did get some really fun info. Like the origins of the nephilim as the original Adamic evil, or the bizarre Irish Antichrist, and the blatant corruption of the Avignon popes. McGinn knows his stuff when it comes to these niche groups. It just seems like he doesn’t have an editor.

If you are a theologian who wants to learn more about the origins of Antichrist, go ahead and pick up McGinn’s book. Otherwise, I’m certain there are better alternatives out there. 1.5/5

[Guera25 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a book for casual readers or beginners. I took a handful of religion courses in college and still needed a refresher course from TA Google in order to remember what some terms meant.

Additionally, it is absolutely useless if you are looking for any interpretations of the Antichrist after 1850 or so.

[Alan Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Historian Benard McGinn presents an excellent history of the Antichrist found in apocalyptic belief. Starting with a Jewish vision of God's enemy, such as Belial, and progressing through the time of the NT, the early church fathers, Middle Ages, Reformation, and up into modern times. He explains the topic as a struggle to understand the persistence of evil in the world.

[Todd Kincaid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unless you want to completely rethink what you think you know about Revelation, the end times, and the figure of the antichrist, don't read this book.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A learned but highly readable survey of the history of the idea of the Antichrist, from early Jewish prophetic writings to the 20th Century. Of especial note is McGinn's examination of how this idea has been used, again and again throughout history, to objectify and demonize political or religious threats, rivals and other groups. Highly recommended as a sane book about religious ideas and their misuse.

[Katharine Holden · Rating 1 out of 5]

Obscure, tedious. Full of jargon and far too much Jung.