Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the hundred and twelfth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. It is an addendum: it does not reprint any work, but gathers, from the works printed in the other volumes, what the early Church Fathers and some later writers said on one subject, the Antichrist. The first part is an essay and a note on method. The second part, the largest, takes sixteen questions that Christians have asked about the Antichrist, from who he is and where he comes from to what holds him back, how long he reigns and how he is defeated. The third part gathers what the Eastern churches, Greek, Syriac, Coptic and Orthodox, said and kept about the Antichrist, from Andrew of Caesarea and John of Damascus to the liturgy, the ascetic writers and the Old Believers; it is summary and not quotation, and each item says how well it is sourced. The fourth part is a short life of each of the ninety-four writers quoted, in seven periods from the apostles to the Middle Ages, and a list of the works quoted.
Each question begins with a summary of the answers the Fathers gave, set out as positions, with the Scripture on which they drew in the King James text. The quotations come after, in order of date. Every quotation has a number, such as 4.17, which is the seventeenth quotation printed under the fourth question; a quotation that bears on several questions is printed once, under the one it is most about, and is listed by its number under the others.
The quotations
There are 861 quotations from 94 writers and about 200 works. Each is word for word from the English translation named with it, which is the translation printed in this series or on the SermonIndex website. A script checked every quotation against the text of its work, and none is a paraphrase. Three dots in a quotation mean that the passage runs on in the original and the words between are left out. Square brackets and notes inside a quotation are the translator’s. About one in five came from a translation that was read by machine from a scanned book and has not been proofread, and these are marked “scanned text”.
The short note under each quotation, the label over it, the summaries of positions, the biographies and the essay were prepared for SermonIndex with the help of artificial intelligence. They are our reading of the quotations, and not a verdict, and they may be wrong. They leave out much, and the reader should go to the whole work, as the Method gives the reason.
Dates and authorship
The Fathers did not all agree, and this book does not hide it. They differ on whether the Antichrist is one man or many, whether the Roman empire holds him back, whether the temple of God is a rebuilt building or the Church, and how long he reigns. Augustine says he does not know what Paul means. Some of the writings quoted are not by the authors whose names they bear, and these are marked as the sources mark them: Pseudo-Hippolytus, Pseudo-Clement and others. The dates are those of the authors and the works as given in the series.