When I was a kid there was speculation in some quarters that Father Charles Coughlin, the notorious anti-Semitic priest, was "The Antichrist." Then some thought it could be Hitler. Then Stalin. One evangelical revivalist insisted it was FDR, who wasn't really dead; his funeral was staged so he could make a new appearance and claim to be resurrected. Meanwhile, a Baptist preacher I knew was certain that the same evangelical revivalist was, himself, The Antichrist.
More recently, a "Christian militia" in Michigan (remember Timothy McVeigh?) seems to believe that President Obama is Satan's Anointed One. A member claimed that they were stockpiling assault rifles because Jesus commanded them to prepare for war against The Antichrist. That message must have gotten to them through Facebook or a text message, because I haven't found a single scripture in the New Testament in which Jesus commanded going to war against anyone, not even the Romans, who could be pretty nasty buggers.
So what does the Christian Bible say about The Antichrist. Nothing. There's no such one being mentioned, anywhere. The book of John slams those who deny that Jesus was a divine being as "antichrists," plural. In the book of Revelation, aka The Apocalypse, John speaks of a vision in which he saw several beasts, including a sort of Super Beast, that humans were forced to honor. Unless you're a traditional Christian (nothing wrong with that), whether this was a divinely inspired vision, or a bad dream, or the result of chewing some strange weed on the island where he was exiled, or a simple literary device used by a creative writer, is open to conjecture. But nowhere does John say that The Beast is The Antichrist, or, as he would have said, an antichrist.
You've heard of the Roman emperor Nero. Definitely not a person you'd take to meet your family, and anything but humane to early Christians. Nero was in power when John was writing all this, and John couldn't very well say anything too inflammatory about him. So, in the opinion of many serious scriptural scholars,* he sent a coded message. He speaks of no one being able to buy or sell without the name of the beast or the number of his name! Then he says, in effect, that he's sending a clue: "This calls for wisdom: let him who has wisdom reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six." In other words, the number stands for a name. Not someone whose telephone number starts with 666 or someone born on June 6 in a year ending in six.
John was a Jew, as were most of those he expected to read his message, and in Hebrew, every letter has a numerical value. The letters of Nero's name in Hebrew could be used to represent the number 666! What could be more obvious? John wasn't warning about some nasty person who was going to take over the world in the "last days." You know, those "last days" that people have thought were upon us for the last two thousand years. No, he was telling the followers of Jesus that Nero was a beast whose lust for power was insatiable. Nero was the top dog of the Romans, and Rome had essentially conquered the world, as it was known to the Jews of that time.
If this is all news to you, don't take my word for it. Check out any Christian Bible and see for yourself.
So why are some people so confused about it? I hate to sound cynical, but I think it's because they've gotten the antichrist myth from others, and never read it for themselves. And/or, it's too convenient to pound and wave Bibles instead of reading them. Or to use what someone thinks is in the Bible as justification for criminal behavior.
Christians, like Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, and everyone else, have a right to believe whatever suits them. But when someone, anyone, uses their belief as an excuse to blow up school buses, or smash airplanes into buildings, or take up assault weapons in a plan to assassinate our duly elected leaders, that's my business and everyone else's.
Those are criminal acts that no real God would condone. Jesus said render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. It's time for Caesar to put the loonies that use religion as an excuse to commit criminal acts behind bars. Let them wait for Jesus to send them a hacksaw. Somehow I don't think Jesus would have much use for people like these.
* One outstanding example of such scholars is Gary DeMar, author of 25 books, who holds a Master of Divinity degree from Reformed Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. degree in Christian Intellectual History from Whitefield Theological Seminary. For a sample of his findings on this subject follow this link:
http://www.artistec.com/gg/Nero_666.pdf