The Enghsh Moral Flays 349 
more important alterations in the story. Both Christ and his fol- 
lowers gave up the idea that the evil power was to come from 
some remote land, in order to impress upon their disciples the im- 
manence of the evil principle in their very midst. It was also 
natural that, as the teaching of Christ dissociated the interests of 
the kingdom of God from those of the Jewish theocracy, the 
tradition should lose much, if not all, of its political significance, 
and assume a purely spiritual import. Therefore, although Christ 
grounded his warning of coming woe on the political prophecy of 
Daniel, the Antichrist that he foretold was to be no foreign king, 
destined to humiliate and overthrow the Jewish theocracy, but 
a false prophet sprung from the Jews themselves, and not one, but 
many.! For, as the tradition was thus spiritualized, the Antichrist 
again lost his personal identity, making himself felt, however, at 
this time not vaguely in some foreign enemy, but intimately in all 
Jews who gave themselves to evil. The Johannine epistle, in which 
the name Antichrist is first used, plainly states that all who deny 
the Father or the Son become themselves Antichrist.2 Thus John 
gave his authority to a distinctly new conception of the Antichrist, 
and, as Paul was the last great Biblical exponent of the older idea 
of a single Antichrist, John became the virtual founder of another 
school of thought. But both these great Christian leaders were at 
one in emphasizing, as earlier thinkers had not done, the moral and 
ethical meaning of the legend—the opposition of sin to holiness. 
These two understandings of the nature of Antichrist were carried 
on in the teaching of the medieval church. Origen, among the 
Fathers the most influential follower of the Johannine exposition, 
was by no means alone. But in the western church the more 
concrete understanding of the Satanic power exerted the greater 
influence, though what of the legend’s political significance was 
retained was entirely changed. Only the Jews, through their un- 
ending hatred of Rome, preserved the tradition that Antichrist was 
to spring from that empire. The Christians, on the contrary, after 
the conversion of Constantine, forgot entirely the historical application 
of the visions of the Apocalypse, following, as Bousset suggests, an 
older version of the legend that antedated Rome’s persecutions of 
the new religion, and looking for the coming of Antichrist to the 

1 See Matt. 24. 15-31. Here and elsewhere the New Testament is 
said to preserve the tradition of a non-political, purely eschatological, 
Antichrist (Bousset, 182-88). 
2 John 2. 22, 4. 3. 
3 See quotations in /Jew7sh Encyclopedia. 
