2,000 years ago, females were not even called as a witness in court, but every July 22, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Orthodox Christians celebrate the feast day of Mary Magdalene, who according to the Gospel of John, was the first witness of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus.
Mary Magdalene disappeared from the canonical Gospels immediately after she reported to the male disciples that she had seen Jesus three days after he had been nailed to and died on a wooden cross; the Roman Empire's way to rid itself of rebels, dissidents, agitators and any other who disturbed the status quo of the Roman Military Occupation.
"For centuries, Mary Magdalene has been misidentified in Western Christian Tradition as an adulteress and repentant prostitute, although nowhere does the New Testament identify her as such...in Eastern Christianity she is referred to as 'Equal to the Apostles'.
Jesus is the first known man to blow apart the societal and religious taboos of speaking with females they were not related to in public and respecting them as equals; one more example of how the male disciples would/could not follow Jesus that closely, for Jesus treated women as fully equal.
To fail to follow what Jesus taught is to be an anti-Christ.
The term "antichrist" only appears five times in the Bible.
However, a cult not based on historical theology has spun an urban legend that seeks Armageddon.
The term "antichrist" never appears in John's Revelation or Daniel, two disparate works of literature written three centuries apart and under very different circumstances, yet a series of pulp fiction and putrid theology espoused in the "Left Behind" series has rendered its adherents in the Body of Christ brain dead, for these books have taken Jesus and left behind everything he was always on about: NONVIOLENT resistance to all evil, love, forgiveness, compassion for all the oppressed and righteous rage for hypocrites and the cold hearted.
Most contemporary Biblical scholars agree that the five canonical verses that mention the "antichrist" were written to attack the Gnostic understanding of who Christ was.
A Gnostic relies on intuition and not on dogma and doctrine. Gnostic's were most certainly free spirits and most all of the writings we have about Gnostics, have been the attacks upon them. That all changed in 1946 with the discovery of the Nag Hamadi Library; and what had been deemed heretical by those in power in the fourth century can now be read in most every language.
Biblical scholars today agree that many books of the Bible were written by others in the name of an apostle, for the quickest way to gain credibility is to trade on another's reputation.
We may never know if the author who coined the term "antichrist" was actually the apostle John who wrote I John and 2 John-the only sources where the term appears.
John also say's:
"As you have heard that the antichrist is coming; even now many have come..."- I John 2:18
"This is how we know who the children of God are not: anyone who does not do right; nor anyone who does not love his brother."-I John 3:10
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