Re: Protestants & The Papacy

You musta missed all those posts where I clearly identified the papacy as the antichrist. Contrary to popular opinion, the Gk prefix αντι (anti) does not mean against. It means instead of, in place of, a replacement or equivalent of, on behalf of or in exchange for, etc...but never against. Even the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary gets this wrong, claiming that the prefix anti in Antichrist means against, thus someone who is against Christ. Nope.........a thousand times NO.

We have been conditioned by countless words, such as antifreeze, antiseptic, antimatter, anti-semitic, etc etc, to think in those terms, but this is one of those cases where the original meaning has evolved over time into something else by virtue of common usage in the language that adopted it. Gk has several words meaning against, but αντι is not one of them. If the NT writers wanted to indicate one who opposed Christ, they could have used instead such words as κατάχριστός or εναντιοχριστός.

So it is quite wrong to think of antichrist in terms of someone who openly opposes Christ. There is one more important point to note, however. The correct definitions of αντι as cited above provide uncannily accurate descriptions of the precise nature of the papal office itself. Descriptions that almost any Roman Catholic would recognize and any pope would own.

There's much more I could say, but it's way past my bedtime.