I’m sure you’ve heard lots of mysterious and frightening things about the Antichrist. But did you know the term only occurs in 1 and 2 John? That’s right. One time it is plural, and four times it is singular.

So why am I not translating the word as “AntiChrist?” Simply, that isn’t a translation at all. It’s a transliteration. English has adopted the word from Greek: anticristos. A transliteration is essentially sticking a foreign word into a new language and making it sound similar. So what does this word originally mean?

Well, the prefix, “anti” sometimes means “against,” but more often “instead of.” Did you know that “Christ” is a transliteration? It means “the anointed one.” (No, it is not his last name!)

So, a translation of Anticristos would be “The instead-of anointed one.” Or as I like to say, “impostor-anointed.”

That can be a spirit or a person, or many people! The author writes that there were already many of these imposters among them.

As you’ll soon be reading in the upcoming weeks, the author is concerned with people misrepresenting Jesus. How so? It seems that even though it had only been a few decades, people’s memories of Jesus were changing. Whether intentional or not, they began to remember and worship a different Jesus than the man that walked among them. Memory and reality can be very different things. So what happens when we love a memory and forget the real thing?

We replace the original with our imaginary memory!

A lot of people worship a Jesus that has no basis in history or reality. They make up their own personal Jesus: An imaginary impostor. As you’ll soon read, the author ponders what this will be like when we see Jesus again. If you’ve made up an imaginary Jesus, how embarrassing it will be once you encounter the real thing!

Chris