Right, Dizerner. Several early Christian writers saw Antichrist as coming at a time future to themselves.Dizerner wrote:The Didache appears to be a very old Christian document that interprets end time passages as yet to be fulfilled:
Irenaeus (120-202 A.D.) wrote the following in Against Heresies Book 5, Ch. XXVIII:
Of course, full preterists have no problem with this. Supposedly, Nero was the antichrist and the rapture occurred in 70 A.D. and all the true Christians were removed from the earth. The religious people who were "left behind" were not true Christians, nor their immediate descendants. No one noticed that Nero was the Antichrist or the disappearance of the saints in the rapture, and so for the next few centuries, men like Irenaeus mistakenly thought the antichrist to be future to their time.For when he (Antichrist) is come, and of his own accord concentrates in his own person the apostasy,
and accomplishes whatever he shall do according to his own will and choice, sitting also in the
temple of God, so that his dupes may adore him as the Christ; wherefore also shall he deservedly
“be cast into the lake of fire:” [this will happen according to divine appointment], God by His
prescience foreseeing all this, and at the proper time sending such a man, “that they may believe a
lie, that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but consented to unrighteousness;”
whose coming John has thus described in the Apocalypse: “And the beast which I had seen was
like unto a leopard, and his feet as of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion; and the dragon
conferred his own power upon him, and his throne, and great might. And one of his heads was as
it were slain unto death; and his deadly wound was healed, and all the world wondered after the
beast. And they worshipped the dragon because he gave power to the beast; and they worshipped
the beast, saying, Who is like unto this beast, and who is able to make war with him? And there
was given unto him a mouth speaking great things, and blasphemy and power was given to him
during forty and two months. And he opened his mouth for blasphemy against God, to blaspheme
His name and His tabernacle, and those who dwell in heaven. And power was given him over every
tribe, and people, and tongue, and nation. And all who dwell upon the earth worshipped him, [every
one] whose name was not written in the book of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.