Is President Obama the Anti-Christ?

One of our tertiaries sent me a link this morning with a video provocatively entitled, “Did Jesus Give us the Name of the Antichrist?” He asked my opinion on it, and this is my reply (which will not make sense unless you see the 4 minute video, which I could not imbed in this posting for technical reasons) …

Dear Sam,

This is typical hysterical nonsense from a sola scriptura heretic. Here are a few problems with it: 

1.) In the passage in question, Our Lord is speaking about Satan falling from the heavens. In the context, casting out demons is the topic. He is not speaking about the anti-Christ, but about the historical fall of Satan. (The narrator of the video obviously sees that problem, but attempts to evade it when he says, foolishly, that Satan is falling to the earth possibly AS the anti-Christ. The anti-Christ and Satan are two different persons.) Catholic commentators often note two things about the passage: 1.) that it’s a warning against pride (so the 72 Disciples don’t let their success go to their head) and 2.) that it is informing the Disciples whence came their power to cast out demons: from the Eternal Word, who witnessed Satan’s fall.

2.) Barack, in Arabic, means “blessed one,” just as Baruch in Hebrew does, or Benedict in Latin. (I’m not denying that a similar word in Aramaic/Hebrew means “heights.”)

3.) He’s assuming that the Aramaic/Hebrew words he has found associated with these Greek words are the right ones. That’s possibly a huge assumption.

4.) The two words are separated by other words in the sentence, where they each have a fixed and evident meaning. In other words, he is seriously reading into the text a meaning that is not there. One might find many other alarming coincidences doing this kind of exegesis on other Biblical texts speaking about demons or the anti-Christ. 

5.) Consider the incongruity of it: In first-century Palestine, Jesus spoke words to the Apostles, not about the anti-Christ, but about Satan, which, when translated into another language from the language of inspiration, might render two words that sound like, but aren’t, the name of an American president of the Twenty-First Century. And that’s supposed to warn us that… said president may or may not be the anti-Christ. Kind of anticlimactic given the eerie music in the background. 

Besides, I once saw definitive proof that Bill Gates is the anti-Christ, so it can’t be President Obama. 

I think I’m going to post this on our site. I took way too much time with it, and some people might appreciate it.