Bartholomew's Notes

The Anti-Christ of Christianity is the Mahdi of Islam? Ever thought about it?…I’ve read Joel’s book, “Ant-Christ” and it is a must have.

See here.

Richardson claims to have sold ten thousand copies of Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah (endorsed by Robert Spencer), and his associate Walid Shoebat has spread the same idea around American churches in presentations and now in a new publication co-authored with Richardson, God’s War on Terror. As I’ve blogged at more length than deserved (here, here, and here), part of their thesis is the claim that the Greek letters for “666” in the Bible are actually the Arabic for “In the name of Allah”. To reach this conclusion, they point to the Codex Vaticanus manuscript of the Bible, which was written in th Fourth Century. Unfortunately for them, they failed to understand that the original Codex does not contain the Book of Revelation; it was added centuries later using a different script which didn’t exist in the Fourth Century, and the nineteenth-century facsimile edition they consulted replaced this with a typeset version (there are also other objections, but this one highlights their incompetence the most dramatically).

The idea of a Muslim Antichrist is just the latest attempt to spin an American conflict into a divine and apocalpytic battle; Robert Fuller has chronicled some previous identifications in his book Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. The blurb provides a good summary:

He shows how the colonists saw Antichrist personified in everyone from native Americans to the Church of England. He looks at the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, showing how such prominent Americans as Yale president Timothy Dwight saw the work of the Antichrist in phenomena ranging from the French Revolution to Masonry. In the twentieth century, Fuller finds a startling array of hate-mongers, such as the Ku Klux Klan, who drew on apocalyptic imagery in their attacks on Jews, Catholics, blacks, socialists, and others. Finally, he considers contemporary fundamentalist writers such as Hal Lindsey and a host of others who have found Antichrist in the sinister guise of the European Economic Community, feminism, and even supermarket barcodes and fibre optics.

Richardson’s book is just the latest in a very long line.

2006

1991

1988

1974

etc, etc…

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