ANTICHEIST
A2TTICHEIST
67
of this kind, and to defend himself vigorously against attack. In 1 P 3'° we have the well-known injunction to be ' ready always to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you,' whether before a judge or in informal conversation — which should probably be interpreted in this sense. In v.^^ of the same chapter ' the answer (AV) of a good conscience towards God' is a difficult phrase, and the com- mentaries should be consulted. iwfpwTT]/j.a can hardly mean ' answer,' and the RV translates ' interrogation ' (see a long note in Huther in Meyer's Com. pp. 192-197). C. Bigg {ICC, in loc.) interprets it of the baptismal question or demand. The Epistle to the Hebrews has been called ' the first Christian apology,' in the sense of a definite and reasoned defence of the Christian faith and position. It had its forerunners in the speeches of St. Paul already referred to, and its successors in the long line of Ante-Nicene 'apologies,' of which those of Justin Martyr and Tertullian are two outstanding examples.
LiTERATUEB. — Comm. on the passages cited; E. F. Scott, The Apologetic of the Sew Testament, 1907 ; H. M. Gwatkin, Early Church History, 1909, ch. xi., and similar works ; W. M. Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Emjdre, 1893, St. Paul the Traveller and Roman Citizen, 1895 ; T. R. Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roma n Empire, 1909.
E. Griffith Jones, ANTICHRIST (dvrlxp^ffTos).— The word is found in the NT only in 1 Jn 2^»- ^' 4^, 2 Jn'', but the idea further appears in the Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, and above all in the Apocalypse. It is not, however, an idea original to Christianity, but an adaptation of Jewish conceptions which, as Bousset has shown (The Antichrist Legend), had developed before the time of Christ into a full-grown Antichrist legend of a hostile counter- part of the Messiah who would make war against Him but whom He would finally overthrow. The NT references to the subject cannot be rightly appreciated without some previous consideration of the corresponding ideas that were present in Judaism before they were taken over by Chris- tianity.
1. The Antichrist of Judaism. — Although the word ' Antichrist ' does not occur till we come to the Johannine Epistles, we have many evidences in pre-Christian Je\vish literature, canonical and extra-canonical, that there was a widely spread idea of a supreme adversary who should rise up against God, His Kingdom and people, or His Messiah. The strands that went to the composi- tion of the idea were various and strangely inter- woven, and much obscurity still hangs over the subject. But it seems possible to distinguish three chief influences that went to the shaping of the Jewish conception as it existed at the time of Christ.
(1) Earliest of all was the ancient dragon-myth of the Babylonian Creation-epic, with its represent- ation of the struggle of Tiamat, the princess of chaos and darkness, against Marduk, the god of order and light. The myth appears to have belonged to the common stock of Semitic ideas, and must have become familiar to the Hebrews from their earliest settlement in Canaan, if indeed it was not part of the ancestral tradition carried with them from their original Aramajan home. In any case, it would be revived in their minds through their close coQfect with the Babylonian mythology during exilic and post-exilic times. Traces of this dragon-myth appear here and there in the OT, e.g. in the story of the Temptation in Gn 3, where, as in Rev 12" 20^, the serpent=the dragon; and in the later apocalyptic literature a dragon represents the hostile powers that rise up in opposition to God and His Kingdom (Pss. Sol. ii. 29). But it was characteristic of the forward look
of Prophetism and Messianism that the idea of a conflict between God and the dragon was trans- ferred from cosmogony to eschatology and repre- sented as a culminating episode of the last days (Is27', Dn7).
(2) Side by side ■with the dragon-myth must be set the Beliar {Belial) conception, a contribution to Jewish thought from the .side of Persian dualism, with its idea of an adversary in whom is embodied not merely, as in the Babylonian Creation-story, the natural forces of chaos and darkness, but all the hostile powers of moral evil. In 1 Gh 2P Satan is evidently represented as God's adversary, just as we find him in later Jewish and primitive Christian thought. And in the interval between OT and NT Beliar is frequently used as a synonym for Satan, the Devil or arch-demon {e.g. Jubilees, 15 ; cf. 2 Co 6^'). The Beliar idea was a much later influence than the dragon-myth, for Baby- lonian religion offers no real parallel to a belief in the Devil, and Cheyne's suggested derivation of the name from Belili, the goddess of the under world {EBi, art. ' Belial '), has little to recommend it. But a subsequent fusion of Beliar with the dragon was very natural, and we have a striking illustration of it when in Wis 2^ and elsewhere the serpent of the Temptation is identified with the Devil. Cf. Rev 12^ 20-, where 'the dragon, the old serpent,' is explained to be ' the Devil and Satan.'