roborate it. Both Irenzus (adv. Haer., v. 25, i. 30, 2) and Hip- polytus (de Antichristo, vi., xiv.) expressly state that antichrist is to be of Jewish descent, and the later echoes of the tradition are as pro- nounced (cf. Bousset’s Antichrist, pp. 24f., 127f, 182f.; Ε. Βἱ., 179 f.).1 Antichrist is to set up his kingdom in Judah ; his reign is from Jerusalem, and the Jews are the dupes of his miraculous influ- ence.2. The ἀποστασία, which Paul anticipates, implies a relation- ship to God which could not be postulated of Christians, much less of pagans in general who, ex hypothesis, “knew not God” (i. 8). The only deliberate anti-Christian movement, which Paul and his friends had already experienced (ἤδη ἐνεργεῖται), was Jewish fanaticism ; its professed zeal for the Law was really ἀνομία, as the apostle puts it with a touch of scathing irony.
Paul is plainly operating with a Beliar(l)-saga* in this passage, If one could only be certain that Sibyll. iii. 63-73 represented a pre- Christian Jewish fragment, as its context indicates, or that any Christian interpolations were confined to minor phrases like ἐκ δὲ Σεβαστηνῶν, we should have one clear trace of this saga. Belial there works many signs (as in Sibyll. it. 37, καὶ βελίαρ θ᾽ ἥξει καὶ σήματα πολλὰ ποιήσει ἀνθρώποις), seduces many even of elect believers within Judaism (πολλοὺς πλανήσει, πιστούς τ᾽ ἐκλεκτούς θ᾽ Ἑβραίους, ἀνόμους τε καὶ ἄλλους ἀνέρας, οἵτινες οὔπω Θεοῦ΄ λόγον εἰσήκουσαν), and is finally burned up, together with his adherents. The suspicions of this pas- sage’s Jewish character seem unjustified; it may be taken, with- out much hesitation, as one reflection of the tradition which was in
1 Bousset often exaggerates the independence of patristic eschatological tradi tion ; he fails to allow enough for the luxuriant fancies of a later age, which applied the N.T. text arbitrarily to contemporary life. But on this point the evidence is fairly decisive, viz., that the early fathers were not merely building on the text of 2 Thess. ii. 3-6, when they spoke of Antichrist being a seducer whose false worship was set up within a reconstructed temple at Jerusalem.
2 Professor Warfield (Exfos.* iv. 40 f.) regards the Jewish state as the divine restraint upon the revelation of Rome’s self-deification. This view is more sensible than that of the Restrainer as Christianity or the church (cf. Reimpell, Studien w. Kritiken, 1887, 711-736), but it is difficult to see how Judaism could be said to im- pose any check upon the imperial cultus; besides, is it likely that Paul would have subtly combined a polemic against the obstinate antagonism of the Jews with a theory of their unconscious protective services to the church ?
3See R. H. Charles’ edition of Ascensio Isaiae (pp. Ixii.-Ixiii.) and M. Fried- lander’s Religidsen Bewegungen innerhalb des fudentums im Zeitalter Fesu (1905, pp. 50f.). This would be corroborated if Beliar were shown to be, as the latter writer argues (in his Der Antichrist, 1go1), a pre-Christian embodiment of the Jewish antinomian sect ὩΣ. For a possible source of such traditions in Paul’s case
cf. 2 Tim. ii. 8.