The Antichrist Test

The apostle John gives a clear test of true Christology in 1 John 4:2-3. The question is not whether a self-professed Christian says the name “Jesus,” but whether they confess him as a genuine human being, not as a preexistent person who became human while remaining double-natured: God and man at the same time.

1 John 4:2 says that the way to recognize the Spirit of God is by believing that Jesus has come “in flesh.” Meyer’s NT Commentary calls it “arbitrary not only to change the participle ἐληλυθότα into the infinitive ἐληλυθέναι, but also to change ἐν [in flesh] into εἰς [into flesh],” as was done by Luther, Calvin, Piscator, and Sander. The phrase “in flesh” presents Jesus as a fully human being, not as a preexistent being who came “into flesh.” This contradicts both the Arian literal-preexistence view and the Trinitarian doctrine of the Incarnation: the belief that the preexistent “God the Son” became human. It also contradicts the later theory that Jesus is composed of two natures, one divine and one human: the so-called “God-man.”

Most translations render 1 John 4:3 as, “Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.” But this usually does not bring out the force of the Greek article τὸν before “Jesus.” The phrase τὸν Ἰησοῦν points back to the “Jesus Christ” just defined in verse 2 as the one “having come in flesh.” The Expositor’s Greek Testament explains that τὸν Ἰησοῦν means “the aforementioned Jesus,” or “Jesus as thus described.” The definite article therefore has demonstrative force: “that Jesus," i.e., the Christ, the anointed one of God, the human person who came into being and was born from Mary.

John was most likely correcting those who either denied Jesus’ genuine flesh-and-blood humanity or believed he was a heavenly being who entered “into,” assumed, or took on flesh. The issue for John, then, is whether one confesses “that Jesus” and not “another Jesus” shaped by Docetic, Arian, or later Trinitarian theories. 1 John 4:2-3 agrees perfectly with John’s own Gospel summary:

“These have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.” John 20:31

John never taught Arian preexistence, let alone “God the Son,” the second person of the Trinity, who came “into flesh.” Rather, he taught that Jesus is the human Son and Christ of God, a uniquely procreated human being who God "fathered and brought into existence" (1 John 5:18; cp. Matthew 1:18-20; Luke 1:30-35). Paul confessed the same truth when he declared that for Christians there is “one God, the Father” and one mediator between that one God and human beings: “the man Christ Jesus, who is himself human” (1 Corinthians 8:6; 1 Timothy 2:5).

This is the central New Testament Christological confession.

John’s warning is a test of whether we confess “that Jesus,” the one identified as the Christ commissioned and miraculously procreated by God, who “came into existence out of a woman,” Mary (Galatians 4:4), who died “to give his life as a ransom in place of many” (Mark 10:45; cp. Romans 5:10), whom God raised from the dead, and whom God “super-exalted” to His right hand in heaven (Philippians 2:9). To confess and preach any other Jesus “is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming, and now that spirit is in the world already” (1 John 4:3b).