How This Study Was Made

How This Study Was Made

SermonIndex

What the quotations are, how they were chosen, what was changed, and what is the work of SermonIndex.

What this is

This section collects what early Christian writers said about the Antichrist, sets their words in order, and lets you read them by question, by period, by author and by Bible passage. It is meant to be a place to read the Fathers, and not to push a view. Where the picture is complicated, we say so.

The quotations

There are 861 quotations from 94 voices and 200 works. Each one was taken from the public-domain English translation in this series or on the SermonIndex website and is word for word. A script checks each quotation against the text of its work, so none is a paraphrase. A line of three dots in a quotation means that the passage runs on in the original; we left out the words in between. Square brackets and notes in the text are the translator’s, not ours. We changed two things for display. The scan of one work printed “im- pending” and another “as- under”, and we have joined these as “impending” and “asunder”. We also stripped a stray line break or two. Nothing else has been changed, and the work named with each quotation holds the original. Some translations come from scanned books, so a stray letter may be wrong. Those quotations are marked “scanned text”.

The notes, the questions and the essay

The short note under each quotation, the one-line label, the sixteen chapters of questions, the biographies, the summaries of the periods and the essay were prepared with the help of artificial intelligence, working from the quotations and from standard biographical knowledge. They are meant to help you read, and they are not authority. They can be wrong, and the quotation is always the thing to check. The way each chapter of questions sorts the Fathers into positions is our judgment; the quotations printed in each chapter are there so that you can test it.

How the quotations were chosen

We first searched every text on the site for the word antichrist and its forms (870 passages). From those, and from passages that discuss Daniel, Paul’s man of sin and the beast of Revelation without using the word, we chose the ones that say something. Passages are marked “essential” (a star) when they are the clearest or earliest statement of a point, or are widely quoted. Every choice is a judgment, and we may have missed passages.

Dates and authors

The site’s own date and author fields are wrong for several works. The dates in this volume come from standard sources and are the ones to trust. Two things to know: the Instructions of Commodian are filed on the site under another author’s name, and we have credited them to Commodian here; and several works are pseudonymous, such as the pieces ascribed to Hippolytus, which are shown separately as “Pseudo-Hippolytus”.

Cautions

The Fathers are not a single voice. They disagree about the temple, the restrainer, the meaning of 666, whether Nero will return, and whether there will be an earthly kingdom. We try to show these disagreements, and to avoid a simple “the Fathers taught”. Some of their statements about Jews and Judaism are hard to read. We include them because they are part of the record, and each is discussed under Question 16 (The Jews and Antichrist), where we explain the context.

The data

All 861 quotations are available as a spreadsheet. They are public-domain texts, and you may use them freely.

Corrections

If a quotation is wrong, a date is off, or a claim is overstated, please tell us, with the number at the end of the card’s link (for example q0481).