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             I, Antichrist?

            Early one shiny autumn morning, I got in my car and
drove to Lynchburg, Va., in order to find out whether or not I am the
Antichrist. You know: the Beast, the Worthless Shepherd, the Little Horn, the
Abomination, the linchpin of the Diabolical Trinity. That Antichrist.

            I had my suspicions. Nowhere on my body could I
find the mark of the Beast--666--but I do have a freckle that's shaped like
Bermuda. And though I have never been seized by a desire to lead the armies of
Satan in a final, bloody confrontation with the forces of God on the plain of
Armageddon, I do suffer from aggravated dyspepsia, as well as chronic malaise,
conditions that I'm sure afflict the Antichrist.

            The surest suspicion I
had about my pivotal role in Christian eschatology grew from the fact that I am
Jewish, male, and alive. These are the qualifications for the job of Antichrist
as specified by Lynchburg's most famous preacher, Jerry Falwell, in a speech he
made earlier this year.

            I was actually going to see the Rev. Falwell on a different
matter, the future of Jerusalem, but I thought I might just slip this
question--the one about me maybe being the Antichrist--into the stream of the
interview. Falwell, I guessed, wouldn't be happy to discuss his views on the
identity of the Antichrist--he had apologized for the remark but took quite a
load of grief for it anyway.

            As it turned out, though,
Falwell was eager to talk about the Antichrist. And, as it also turned out, he
didn't really feel bad for saying what he said. In fact, he was more convinced
than ever that the Antichrist is a Jew who walks among us.

            Let me pause for a moment to give three concise reasons why
I'm so curious about the identity of the Antichrist:

            1) I think I speak for all the approximately 4.5
million adult male Jews in the world when I say that we get a little antsy when
Christians start looking at us like we're the devil. This is on account of
Christian behavior over the past 2,000 years, by which I mean blood libels and
pogroms and inquisitions, those sorts of things.

            2) I've always been possessed by the delusional
notion that I am to play a major role in world history, so why not a role in
the End of Days? And I don't mean the Schwarzenegger movie.

            3) Now that we stand on
the lip of the millennium, much of the evangelical Christian world is in the
grip of Armageddon fever, and, according to the evangelical interpretation of
the books of Daniel and Revelation, the Antichrist will make his appearance
before Christ makes his, and his is looking kinda imminent. The Antichrist, in
this reading, will be a world leader who strikes a peace deal with Israel, only
to betray the Jewish state and make war on it, until Jesus comes to the rescue.
The thankful Jews, those who are still alive, will then become Christians and
live happily ever after. These beliefs, held by tens of millions of Christians
are, journalistically speaking, worthy of note.

            The day before my visit with the Rev. Falwell, I had just
finished reading a novelistic treatment of these events, Assassins ,
which is subtitled Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist .
Assassins is the sixth book in the "Left Behind" series, "left behind"
referring to those unfortunate nonevangelical Christians who are not taken up
to heaven in the Rapture--the opening act in God's end days plan--and are
forced to contend with the Antichrist's evil reign on Earth. The "Left Behind"
series, co-written by Tim LaHaye, the prominent right-wing screwball and
husband of Beverly LaHaye, the even more prominent right-wing screwball, and
Jerry B. Jenkins, who, his biography states, is the author of 130 books, which
is a lot of books for one guy to write, is a phenomenon. Ten million copies of
the series have sold already--hundreds in my local PriceClub alone. "Left
Behind" is the Harry Potter of the Armageddon set.

            The notable thing for me
about the "Left Behind" series--beside the fact that few in the secular media
have noticed that millions of Americans are busy reading books warning about
the imminence of one-world government, mass death, and the return of the
Messiah, is that all the Jewish characters are Christian. LaHaye and Jenkins
are both active participants in the absurd and feverish campaign by some
evangelical Christians to redefine Judaism in a way that allows for belief in
Jesus.

            Jews (and again, I feel comfortable speaking for all of us
here) find this sort of Christian imperialism just a wee bit offensive. Just
imagine if Jews began an official campaign calling Muhammad irrelevant to
Islam--can you imagine the fatwas that would produce?

            But evangelical leaders, who are, in my experience,
uniformly kind and generous in their personal relations, can also be terribly
obnoxious in their relations with Jews.

            There is only one road
to salvation for Jews, and that road runs through Jesus, LaHaye told me. To his
credit, though, LaHaye doesn't believe that the Antichrist will be Jewish. He
will be a European gentile, who will kill lots of Jews. "The Jews will be
forced to accept the idolatry of the Antichrist or be beheaded," he said. This
will take place during the seven-year Tribulation.

            Jewish suffering, though, is divinely ordained. Even though
the Antichrist will not be Jewish, Jews are still capable of great evil and
have often been punished for their evil, LaHaye explained. "Some of the
greatest evil in the history of the world was concocted in the Jewish mind,"
LaHaye told me, for reasons that aren't entirely clear--he knew what the name
"Goldberg" generally signifies. "Sigmund Freud, Marx, these were Jewish minds
that were infected with atheism."

            I asked LaHaye to tell me more about the Jewish
mind.

            "The Jewish brain also has the capacity for great
good," he explained. "God gave the Jews great intelligence. He didn't give them
great size or physical power--you don't see too many Jews in the NFL--but he
gave them great minds."

            Of all the evangelical
leaders I have interviewed, LaHaye is capable of some of the most anti-Semitic
utterances, which is troublesome, because he is also the most popular author in
the evangelical world.

            The Rev. Falwell is smoother than LaHaye. He acknowledges
"where the sensitivity comes from," though he shows no understanding of the
role the myth of the Antichrist played in the history of anti-Semitism, and he
refuses to back away from his opinion that somewhere in Great Neck or West L.A.
or Shaker Heights is living Satan's agent.

            "In my opinion," he told me, "the Antichrist will
be a counterfeit of the true Christ, which means that he will be male and
Jewish, since Jesus was male and Jewish."

            I asked him if he understood that such statements
strip Jews of their humanity, which is the first step anti-Semites take before
they kill them. He responded, "All the Jewish people we do business with on a
daily basis, not one has ever got upset over this." It is not Jews who picked
this most recent fight, he said, it is supporters of President Clinton.

            "Billy Graham made the
same statement a dozen times last year, but there was no comment about that,"
Falwell said. "But Billy Graham was not calling for the resignation of the
president." Falwell, you'll recall, is no fan of Clinton's; he has even peddled
a video accusing the president of murder.

            Falwell is right: Evangelical preachers are constantly
accusing the Jews of harboring the Antichrist.

            I asked Falwell if he knew the actual identity of
the Antichrist. No, he said. "People might say, it's a certain person, it's
Henry Kissinger, like that, but the Lord does not let us know that."

            So there's a chance, then, that I'm the
Antichrist?

            Falwell chuckled a condescending chuckle. "It's
almost amusing, that question. Of course not. I know that you're not."

            Why?

            "The Antichrist will be a world leader, he'll have
supernatural powers," he said.

            He got me there--I have no supernatural powers. I
can't even drive a stick shift.

            I pressed him further on
the identity of the Antichrist, but Falwell wouldn't play. "We'll know the
Antichrist when he arrives," he said.

            Most evangelical leaders, in fact, refuse to publicly guess
the name of the Antichrist--though, as Falwell suggests, Kissinger is a
perennial favorite, at least among those evangelicals who believe the
Antichrist will be Jewish. For most of their history, Christian leaders had
been content to ascribe the characteristics of the Antichrist to the Jewish
people as a whole. "Ever since the 2 nd century CE, the very
beginning of the Antichrist legend, Christians have associated Jews with
everything unholy," Andrew Gow, who teaches Christian history at the University
of Alberta, told me. In the minds of early Christian leaders, the church was
the new Israel; God's covenant with the Jews was obsolete. Therefore, the Jews
who remained on Earth were there to serve devilish purposes, Gow explained.

            There are plenty of
evangelical thinkers who differ with Falwell, who believe, like LaHaye, that
the Antichrist will be a gentile who rises out of Europe. "The Antichrist is
supposed to make a peace treaty with Israel," Ed Hindson, the author of Is
the Antichrist Alive and Well? , explained. "Why would a Jew make a peace
treaty with a Jewish state?"

            Hindson suggested that Satan will make the Antichrist the
leader of the European Union--the revived Roman Empire, eternal enemy of
Israel--though Hindson disputed one popular idea advocated by Monte Judah, an
Oklahoma-based prophecy-teacher, that Prince Charles is the Antichrist.

            "There's no way Prince Charles is the Antichrist,"
Hindson said. "Satan can do better than that."

            In his book, Hindson runs through a list of
potential candidates. Bill Clinton is there, of course, as well as Saddam
Hussein and Ronald Wilson Reagan (six letters in each of his three names. Get
it?).

            Of course, none of these men are gay.

            "It says in the Bible
that the Antichrist will have 'no regard for women,' and so many evangelicals
interpret that to mean that he will be a homosexual," Hindson said, though he
added that he's not entirely convinced.

            This idea--the Antichrist as gay--strikes a chord with many
evangelicals, just as the idea that the Antichrist is Jewish strikes a
chord.

            I gradually came to see how far-fetched it was to
think that I might be the Antichrist. I'm not gay, I'm not famous, I wouldn't
know a euro if I found one in my wallet.

            Then it struck me: Barry Diller is the
Antichrist.

            There's no way to know for sure. But if you wake up
one morning to read that Barry Diller is the head of the European Union (and
that David Geffen is his deputy), well, remember where you read it first.