See the previous post in this 2 part mini-series on the Antichrist HERE.

The presence of the antichrist spirit in the Christian narrative as the ultimate danger primarily means we are not considering an outside oppositional force but rather that Christianity contains within itself the loose thread of its own potential unraveling, the Jenga piece that once removed self-deconstructs the entire tower.  The Christ of faith is lost in the search for the Jesus of history, the antichrist lampooning the unhistorical Christ. We saw this last time with how Mark cleverly inserts narrative elements that contradict the crucifixion/resurrection salvation guiding theme of his gospel.  And, Mark playfully alerts the sophisticated reader to this right from the beginning having Jesus preach repentance and the kingdom of God, not himself and salvation through crucifixion/resurrection like what we see Paul emphasizes. We sometimes forget in our interpretations that focus on Jesus how the writers are also thinking about his counterparts (antichrist and Satan).

The more the antichrist spirit prompts us to find the man Jesus behind the curtain of the Christ of Oz, the more we find only smoke.  Paul has only one narrative detail of the crucifixion, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and Mark builds an elaborate narrative about this, not out of historical fact, but by recapitulating psalms and Isaiah, and in fact takes this as his methodological clue to invent Jesus’ biography as an imitation of Jewish (haggadic midrash) and Greek (mimesis) literature.  In other words, while Paul claimed Christ died and rose according to the scriptures, the 2 central elements of Paul’s faith, Mark ballooned this into a “new and greater” writing by presenting that Jesus’ entire life was lived according to the scriptures. Mark’s core imitation is presenting himself as a new and greater Paul

Paul wrote about half the New Testament, with virtually no biographical details because he wanted to focus on Christ and him crucified, and Mark lampoons this by constructing a detailed biography out of unhistorical typology and historical fiction.  This drive of the antichrist spirit to leave faith behind and strive after the man Jesus is not superstitious invention, but the very spirit of “relationship to Jesus” and so for instance for the last 200 years scholars have always anew taken up what they call the quest for the historical Jesus, the next major installment of which will be:

It is the very meaning of New Testament scholarship to ever further abandon the Christ of Faith in search of the Jesus of history.