Of course you do not address your fallacy of using the word (it).
Sure I did. I equated it to the fallacy of claiming John teaches that antichrist is a singular man, when He doesn't.
We're either Both in the right to do so, or we're both wrong.
I'm content acquiescing the point that IT is not in the original Greek.
It does not effect my eschatology at all.
In contrast, if you acquiesce the point that John Never even once teaches that antichrist is a singular human man, your eschatology falls flat.
I believe you're this first person that I've heard that doesn't believe the Beast of Revelation Rev 13, the man of sin 2nd Thess, and the AC in this passage are not the same... I feel I'm in good company to believe they're the same.
A lot of people don't believe the Bible is even true.
If you wish to measure the correctness of your doctrine by who has the greater number, those who believe it vs. those who don't, you'll have to toss Christianity away, as it is not the majority position among humanity.
Who does believe they're different men ? Could you supply some references please ?
Here's a great History of the genesis and evolution of the belief about antichrist throughout Church History.
The Untold Truth Of The Antichrist
The "conventional wisdom" pendulum has swung back and forth a few times in the last 2000 years between a "THE antichrist" figure and a "multiple antichrists".
The challenge, in fact, is to find even ONE ECF or theologian in the first 1000 years of Church History, besides Polycarp, who even wrote about Antichrist, much less believed and taught that it was a single Human Man. Polycarp was the only one who even comes close, and from your question, you seem to indicate that a view held by only person in the Church should not be entertained as true and correct, right? especially if found that only one person over a period of 1000 years of Church History held it, huh? But, for 1000 years, Polycarp was it, and he really only quoted Johns epistle warning of multiple antichrists. (Polycarp,
To the Philippians 7.1)
Finally, in 950 AD, Adso of Montier-en-Der, a French monk, was commissioned by Queen Gerberga to expound upon to her what this antichrist was...
From the article:
It wasn't until 950 A.D., almost a thousand years after Jesus died, that someone wrote down just who exactly this Antichrist guy was going to be. According to PBS, Queen Gerberga (sometimes "Gerbera") of France asked the monk Adso of Montier-en-Der for clarification on details about the Antichrist because the Bible sure didn't have specifics and neither did other church writings. So this one random monk got to make up whatever he wanted, and it went as viral as something could for the Middle Ages. The letter he wrote the queen was updated by other people who threw in their own ideas, but for hundreds of years, what Adso said about the Antichrist was, for lack of a better term, gospel.
The Encyclopedia Britannica says Queen Gerberga was worried she was living in the last days and wanted to know what to be on the lookout for. "Little Book on the Antichrist" was written in a popular style of the day, following the life of a saint, or in this case, an antisaint.
Adso believed the Antichrist wouldn't show up until the end of the Holy Roman Empire. He'd be born a Jew in Babylon, and the devil would make him the most wicked guy ever. But he would look a lot like the second coming of Christ: going to Jerusalem to minister, performing miracles, and rebuilding the Temple. Everyone would follow him, but he would persecute Christians for three and a half years. Fortunately, real Jesus would come along and kill him.
Sound familiar?
The article continues:
After Adso, the medieval idea of the Antichrist was mostly set, but the monk Joachim Of Fiore came along in the 1100s and had his own stuff to add. According to the journal article "Antichrists and Antichrist in Joachim of Fiore," this guy was obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist. It was basically all he could talk about. He became famous in his own lifetime for being the go-to person for prophecies about the Antichrist.
Other than John of Patmos (author of Revelation), Joachim was probably the most important apocalyptic thinker ever. The Encyclopedia Britannica says he saw the End Times being right around the corner. But there wasn't going to be just one Antichrist according to Joachim, but a whole bunch of them over time. Some already lived, like Nero, Muhammad, and Saladin. They were Antichrist more generally, but there would be one finally really bad Antichrist signaling the beginning of the end. In Revelation, a guy named Gog shows up to battle Christians. Joachim tied the final Antichrist to Gog, using that name, and after 1,000 years, Revelation and the Antichrist were finally connected.
Luther was next to champion the idea of a single THE antichrist, when he tied it to the Pope, but a single "The Antichrist" soon fell out of favor again for several hundred years afterward after Luther's Belief that He was living in the end times, failed to materialize...
It wasn't until about 1900 that we can trace our current proclivity toward the THE antichrist idea to, oddly, Nietzsche.
From the article again:
After Martin Luther, people basically stopped thinking about the Antichrist being a single bad guy for hundreds of years. "The" Antichrist became a thing of the past, and something being Antichrist, that is, against Christianity, was in vogue. According to The Gospel Coalition, it wasn't until about 1900 that "the" returned to the Antichrist. These days, it's so common to speak of "the" Antichrist that older documents that only refer to Antichrist sometimes have "the" inserted in brackets in front of it, as if the original author made some kind of silly mistake leaving it out. But usually they didn't. They meant exactly what they wrote, that Antichrist was a concept, not a person in need of the definite article.
So what changed? Weirdly, Nietzsche might be largely responsible for the switch from Antichrist back to "the" Antichrist. In 1895, he published a very anti-Christian book called The Antichrist, and it entered popular vernacular. By the 1970s, Christians had fully accepted the Antichrist as an individual again.
So there ya go.
As I have been saying, The Idea of a Singular future to us world ruler/despot/tyrant called "the antichrist" demonstrably traces its roots to Post Biblical, man made Tradition, and not to any explicit scriptural or apostolic teaching.