There is no lawless person

One of the great principles of translation and interpretation of the New Testament is to make sure that all the manuscripts say the same thing about a passage. The New Testament has come down through so many years that manuscript families and traditions are traceable. In the case of this man of lawlessness, perhaps it is worth checking the manuscript families to make sure that they all say the same thing. In fact, they don't. The top 4 manuscript traditions are split 50/50 on what words actually existed for the translation that so many render lawlessness. Two of the big 4 say man of sin.

Some may say that there is not a lot of difference between being without law and sin. But one of the easiest ways to look at the difference is to say that the man of sin means the opposite of the expression man of God or man of righteousness. Therefore, all the writer is saying is that the man of sin is a pagan or non-believer, nothing more.

If this idea is plugged into the passage, the interpretation goes somethig like this. There would be resistence to the message of Jesus. Pagans, who have sold out to the devil anyway, would become gods unto themselves. God would bring to light the contrast between those who want to destroy themselves and those who want to rescue themselves as the message spread through the Roman world (The writer's current time period would then fit the phrase at just the right time [vs. 6]) and encountered various kinds of resistence. Jesus would win the battle of resistence as people began to show faithfulness to the new message. Satan would begin losing his tight grip on the world because God would begin punishing those who would not believe or those who would persecute believers.

The above paragraph is merely a flowery way of describing the war between good and evil that has always existed except it is given a Christian wrapping since goodness is equated with believing the story of Jesus. Good and evil happens in every generation. So when a modern reader reads about the man of sin, he or she reads it as a synonym for non-christian, not as a person in a particular time period, simply a pagan in need of a lifestyle change.