Who is this lawless person?

Anytime a document from antiquity is read by someone in the modern world, certain oddities stand out. It is true with any ancient document. Peculiarities about Beowulf stand out from the Old English language; strangeness is noticed in Ulysses in Latin; some unique features surface in the Greek of the Odyssey. The further back one goes in time, usually the stranger certain features appear to the modern eye.

So, when features of a passage from 2nd Thessalonians 2 suddenly appear to have some odd features to the modern reader, then understanding the historical, literary, and linguistic context goes a long way in clearing up the oddity. In particular, a term appears that seems to carry a little more weight than other words in the passage–the lawless man. Some say that the religious and historical context demand that the term be seen as a proper noun. Jews had been interpreting Daniel's visions for quite some time as being a predictor of an end of the age scenario in which someone would blaspheme the Most High so horrendously that it would trigger the sequence of events for the end of time. If that's the case, then the term becomes The Man of Lawlessness. Once the term takes on proper noun status, then one can start to see connections between it and other proper noun references in other parts of the Bible. Daniel's 4th beast (ch.7) and Revelation's ten-horned beast (ch.13) seem to line up with a Man of Lawlessness because all 3 proper nouns blaspheme the name of the Almighty.

Other intepretations for this important term appear later this week.