The "Man of Sin" Identified by Name

The "Man of Sin" Identified by Name


Below is the 28th of multiple excerpts of commentary from Parts I and II of The Parousia, the late 19th-century masterpiece on the Second Coming by James Stuart Russell. The initial 31 posts on this blog deal with the Book of Revelation, which is cogently interpreted in Part III of Russell's magnum opus. (For all blog posts, see russellparousia.blogspot.com) [Note: In a previous post on the Parousia blog, Russell explained why the individual cryptically referred to as the "man of sin" was, based on specific characteristics, a Roman figure already known by the 1st-century Thessalonians. The Apostle Paul, in his second letter to the Thessalonians dated A.D. 52-53, had to write in secret code about this man "because it was not safe to be more explicit," Russell observed. "On the one hand, a hint was enough, for they could all understand his meaning; on the other, more than a hint was dangerous, for to name the person might have compromised himself and them." In the excerpt below, Russell identifies by name the "man of sin."]

[2 Thess. 2:3-12---'Let no man deceive you by any means; for [the day of the Lord shall not come] unless there shall have come the apostasy first, and the man of sin shall have been revealed, the son of perdition: who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or an object of worship: so that he seateth himself in the temple of God, and openly declareth himself a god. Remember ye not that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what hindereth his being revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already working, only he who now hindereth will hinder until he be taken out of the way. And then shall the lawless one be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus shall slay with the breath of his mouth, and shall destroy with the appearance [Greek: epiphaneia, 'appearance' or 'brightness'] of his coming: [even him, the lawless one] whose coming is after the working of Satan in all power and signs and wonders of falsehood, and in all deceit of unrighteousness for them that are perishing, because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.' ...] Russell's commentary:

"Let us now turn to the description of ‘the man of sin’ given by the apostle, and endeavour to discover, if possible, whether there was any individual then existing in the Roman Empire to whom it will apply. "1. The description requires that we should look, not for a system or abstraction, but an individual, a ‘man.' "2. He is evidently [i.e., in an evident manner, thus clearly] not a private, but a public person. The powers with which he is invested imply this. "3. He is a personage holding the highest rank and authority in the State. "4. He is heathen, and not Jewish. [See previous post on Parousia blog.] "5. He claims divine names, prerogatives, and worship. "6. He pretends to exercise miraculous power. "7. He is characterised by enormous wickedness. He is ‘the man of sin,’ i.e. the incarnation and embodiment of evil. "8. He is distinguished by lawlessness as a ruler. "9. He had not yet arrived at the fulness of his power when the apostle wrote; there existed some hindrance or check to the full development of his influence. "10. The hindrance was a person; was known to the Thessalonians; and would soon be taken out of the way. "11. The ‘lawless one,’ the ‘man of sin,’ was doomed to destruction. He is ‘the son of perdition,’ ‘whom the Lord shall slay.’ "12. His full development, or ‘manifestation,’ and his destruction are immediately to precede the Parousia [Second Coming]. ‘The Lord shall destroy him with the brightness of his coming.’ "With these descriptive marks in our hands can there be any difficulty in identifying the person in whom they all are found? Were there three men in the Roman Empire who answered this description? Were there two? Assuredly not. But there was one, and only one. When the apostle wrote he [the man of sin] was on the steps of the Imperial throne---a little longer and he sat on the throne of the world [in A.D. 54]. It is NERO, the first of the persecuting emperors; the violator of all laws, human and divine; the monster whose cruelty and crimes entitle him to the name ‘the man of sin.’ "It will at once be apparent to every reader that all the features in this hideous portraiture belong to Nero; but it is remarkable how exact is the correspondence, especially in those particulars which are more recondite [deep] and obscure. He is an individual---a public person---holding the highest rank in the State; heathen, and not Jewish; a monster of wickedness, trampling upon all law. But how striking are the indications that point to Nero in the year when this epistle was written, say A.D. 52 or 53. At that time Nero was not yet ‘manifested;’ his true character was not discovered; he had not yet succeeded to the Empire. Claudius, his step-father, lived, and stood in the way of the son of Agrippina. But that hindrance was soon removed. In less than a year, probably, after this epistle was received by the Thessalonians, Claudius was ‘taken out of the way,’ a victim to the deadly practice of the infamous Agrippina; her son also, according to [Roman historian] Suetonius, being accessory to the deed. But ‘the mystery of lawlessness was already working;’ the influence of Nero must have been powerful in the last days of the wretched Claudius; the very plots were probably being hatched that paved the way for the accession of the son of the murderess. A few months more would witness the advent to the throne of the world of a miscreant whose name is gibbeted in everlasting infamy as the most brutal of tyrants and the vilest of men. "The remaining notes of the description are no less true to the original. The claim to divine honours; the opposing and exalting himself above all that is called God, or an object of worship; his seating himself in the temple of God, showing himself to be a god; all are distinctive of Nero. ... "...Nero...came behind none of his predecessors in his impious assumption of divine prerogatives. [Roman historian] Dio Cassius informs us that when he returned victorious from the Grecian games, he [Nero] entered Rome in triumph, and was hailed with such acclamations as these, ‘Nero the Hercules! Nero the Apollo! Thou August, August! Sacred voice! Eternal One.’ In all this we see sufficient evidence of the assumption of divine honours by Nero. "The same is true with respect to another note in this delineation,---the pretension to miraculous powers. ‘Whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders’ (ver. 9 [2 Thess. 2:9]). This pretension follows almost as a matter of course from the assumption of the prerogatives of deity. "It is to be supposed that the Imperial Divus [divinity] would be credited with the possession of supernatural powers; and we find a very remarkable sidelight thrown upon this subject in Rev. xiii. 13-15 [Rev. 13:13-15]. [See Russell's identification of the Beast of Revelation in previous Parousia blog posts.] ... "Further, ‘the man of sin’ is doomed to perish. He is ‘the son of perdition,’ a name which he bears in common with Judas, and indicative of the certainty and completeness of his destruction. ‘The Lord is to slay him with the breath of his mouth, and to destroy him with the appearance of his coming.’ In this significant expression we have a note of the time when the man of sin is destined to perish, marked with singular exactitude. It is the coming of the Lord, the Parousia, which is to be the signal of his destruction; yet not the full splendour of that event so much as the first appearance or dawn of it. ...’ This evidently implies that the man of sin was destined to perish, not in the full blaze of the Parousia, but at its first dawn or beginning. Now what do we actually find? Remembering how the Parousia [Second Coming] is connected with the destruction of Jerusalem, we find that the death of Nero preceded the event. It took place in June A.D. 68, in the very midst of the Jewish[-Roman] war which ended in the capture and destruction of the city and the temple [in A.D. 70]. It might therefore be justly said that ‘the appearance, or dawn, of the Parousia’ [Greek: epiphaneia tes parousias] was the signal for the tyrant’s destruction. "It does not follow that the death of Nero was to be brought about by immediate supernatural agency because it is said that ‘the Lord shall slay him with the breath of his mouth,’ etc. Herod Agrippa was smitten by the angel of the Lord, but this does not exclude the operation of natural causes: ‘he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost’ (Acts xii.23 [Acts 12:23]). So Nero was overtaken by the divine judgment, though he received his deathblow from the sword of the assassin, or from his own hand. "Lastly, it is scarcely necessary to make good the title of Nero to the appellation ‘the man of sin.’ It will be observed that it is the profligacy of his personal character that stamps him with this distinctive epithet, as if he were the very impersonation and embodiment of vice. ... "But there is probably another reason why Nero is branded with this epithet. The name ‘man of sin’ was not unknown to Hebrew history. It had already been given to one who was not only a monster of cruelty and wickedness, but also a bitter enemy and persecutor of the Jewish people. It would not have been possible to pronounce a name more hateful to Jewish ears than the name of Antiochus Epiphanes. "He [Antiochus Epiphanes] was the Nero of his age, the inveterate enemy of Israel, the profaner of the temple, the sanguinary persecutor of the people of God. In the first Book of Maccabees we find the name ‘the man the sinner’ (aner hamartolos) given to Antiochus (1 Macc. ii. 48, 62 [1 Macc. 2:48, 2:62]) and it seems highly probable that the epithet 'man of sin' was chosen to designate a person of like character and destined to a similar fate with Antiochus, the relentless tyrant and persecutor who became a monument of the wrath of God."