False messiahs and prophets
NowOngoingResearch statusGeneric
5For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.
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2And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.
3And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?
4And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.
5For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.
6And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
7For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
8All these are the beginning of sorrows.
11And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.
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8All these are the beginning of sorrows.
9Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.
10And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.
11And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.
12And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.
13But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
14And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.
24For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
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21For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.
22And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.
23Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.
24For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
25Behold, I have told you before.
26Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not.
27For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
Jesus warned that "many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many" (), and that "false Christs, and false prophets ... shall shew great signs and wonders" (). Christians see this borne out from the first generation. The Jewish historian Josephus, who was not a Christian, records the very types Jesus described in the decades before 70 CE: Theudas, the Egyptian, prophets who led crowds into the wilderness, and, in August 70, "a great number of false prophets" urging the people to go up to the Temple to receive "miraculous signs of their deliverance". Such figures have appeared in every century since, from a man of Bourges in 591 who said he was Christ and drew more than 3,000 followers, to many modern founders. A warning that has held true in every age is, on its own terms, what Jesus said: "the end is not yet" ().
The warning has held true in every age, so it cannot mark a particular time. The research checked the Gospel texts, Josephus, Acts, early church writers and modern lists of claimants. Whether such figures are increasing today cannot be tested: the published lists lean heavily towards recent, better-documented cases (one list of people who claimed to be Jesus begins about 1730 and leaves out the man of Bourges), and the world's population has grown about 25-fold.
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Critics make three points. Mark's Gospel is usually dated about 70 CE, so the warning may have been written down after some of these figures had already appeared. Such claimants were also common before Jesus: in 4 BCE Simon and Athronges each "put a diadem" on, so the warning describes a familiar pattern rather than a surprising forecast. And every era has read its own claimants as the sign: the First Letter of John (2:18) did so, and so did Gregory of Tours in 591 ("as is true at the present time"). In Mark's version (13:6) the Greek has only "I am"; the word "Christ" is supplied in the KJV.