1 JOHN EXPOSES THE PAPACY AS DENYING THE FLESH OF CHRIST

Many Christians have understood the Pope to be the Antichrist spoke of in the Bible.

Some Roman Catholics deny that the pope could be the Antichrist for 1 John 2:22 says that he who denies that Jesus has come in the flesh is an Antichrist and 1 John 4:3 says that denial of the fleshy existence of Jesus is of the spirit of the Antichrist while the pope believes that Jesus did live among as a man. But all the epistle is saying is that the Antichrist influences the heresy and makes it progress by his black magic. It does not say it will be the only heresy he will do this for. When he comes he might find no need to deny that Jesus had a body but to manipulate others into doing it. He will promote whatever heresy suits him in the war against Christ.
 
What is more important is why the Antichrist would deny that Jesus has a body. The reason is to stop people having the beliefs about Jesus that they need for salvation. If the gospel of the pope is incompatible with these beliefs then the pope is definitely an Antichrist if not the Antichrist.
 
Reason says that if Jesus saves, it does not matter what you believe as long as you are open to the influence of this saving supernatural being. That way Jesus could still work in you though your beliefs about him are completely wrong. The reason it matters not as that as long as you develop virtues it does not matter if your religious beliefs are wrong. What would matter is your belief about virtue for it affects how you behave and live. The apostle John condemning those who denied Jesus was the Christ and had come in the flesh is just showing his own bigotry and ignorance. Anyway a true Christian holds that dogma does matter though it does not.
 
John says that the Antichrist is coming but many Antichrists have come which indicates that it is the last hour (1 John 2:18). There must have been a huge number of them and they must have been putting the Church in real danger of losing the faith meaning Jesus would soon have to bring about the last day before the Church would be annihilated for he promised there would always be true believers. The pope then is the only possible candidate for he has been corrupting the faith since the early centuries of the Church. John says the Antichrist is nigh which is why he used the expression hour and not year or week to accentuate that his coming was a short time and other scriptures say that the Antichrist will be around when Jesus comes. There is nobody else. This is sufficient to convict the papacy of being condemned by its own scriptures as the Antichrist and as occultic meaning it uses hidden forces to do its evil while presenting a respectable face to the world. The popes are all the Antichrist for they share the one evil spirit that manifests through them. They are many men with one satanic soul, a soul that is a demon from the pit.
 
Even if John said that the Antichrist will definitely deny that Jesus came in the flesh and was the Christ the papacy denies both doctrines not verbally but the way denying it counts – in action. The pope has set himself and the Church up as the interpretators of Jesus. So Jesus can’t have his own say and they do the talking for him meaning that Jesus is not being followed but the pope and the Church are being followed and they trick you to think that it is Jesus you serve. Denying outright that Jesus came in the flesh would not be as dangerous as doing it without anybody noticing. The Catholic Church then is as lethal as the Antichrist meaning it must belong to him for nobody could surpass him in opposing Christ and damaging the Church of God. The Jesus and God of Rome are mental idols. When the real Jesus is replaced by an imaginary one it is obvious that the real one is being denied and opposed and is being accused of not being the Christ. The imaginary Jesus is the real one to the Church so it denies that Jesus came in the flesh. If I imagine a Jesus like the one of the gospels and worship him I do not worship the Jesus of the gospels.
 
Following an interpretation of Jesus Christ is following an interpretation not Jesus. The Catholic Church offers a Jesus who is another Jesus in the eyes of the apostle Paul (Galatians 1). This is worse than the ghostly Jesus of the Docetists. He is as unreal as any abstraction.
 
John said that we must test the spirits and we must do it by asking the spirit if it believes that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. If it says he has, then it is from God (1 John 4:1-3). Had there been a pope sent by God in those days he would have told us to check what the spirit says alongside the statements of the pope. That would be a more reliable and thorough test if the claims of the pope to be the source of divine truth along with the Church (since 1870 he no longer needs the consent of the Church to give infallible revelations so he is potentially the ONLY source) is true. A spirit could tell you that Jesus came in the flesh and was the Christ and still lead you astray. My belief is that John would have replied that because there was no evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ apart from a few men claiming visions of him that no demon would say Jesus existed. That is the only way to make sense of John here. Demons would not support the belief that Jesus Christ came in the flesh for knowing that doctrine was necessary for salvation. That means that if they could get you to believe in another Jesus this doctrine would be no good. Rome gets you to believe in another Jesus for its Eucharist is the Jesus it gives you to save you. In addition, the pope controls how you see Jesus so that you don’t get to the real Jesus for salvation. The Church of Rome denies the coming of Jesus in the flesh in the sense that it directs you to a wafer and gets you to ignore Jesus the flesh man.
 
Some Protestants believe that the denial that Jesus came in the flesh really refers to the Roman Catholic denial that Jesus was born of a sinful mother. The flesh stands for what is inclined in us to turn away from God. They say Jesus had this kind of flesh but he did not allow it to cause him to sin. They say that Jesus earned our salvation by chiefly by refusing to sin despite his inclinations to sin which he managed to triumph over and to undermine this doctrine by saying he was born of a sinless mother who couldn’t pass on sinful inclinations to him is to adopt a heresy that prevents salvation. But if Jesus could be sinless and yet be in danger of committing it so could Mary his mother.
 
I reject this interpretation of the Roman Catholic denial on the basis that there is no need for it and there were people who held that Jesus’ flesh was not real. But those who accept the interpretation argue that since the pope says Jesus was born of a sinless mother he was not born with flesh like ours in every respect so the pope is the antichrist for he denies the coming of Jesus in the flesh. It is correct in the respect that if Jesus was born of a sinless mother he was not like us in all things but sin. He had to feel temptation and be in danger of succumbing to it like the rest of us so he needed to be born of a woman who was flawed and who tried to put bad influences his way. The whole point of insisting that Jesus had to be fully human was that in his rejection of sin he did good for us in our place and had to be one of us to atone for us. The pope then in a sense denies the coming of Jesus in the flesh which means his doctrine of Jesus cannot save.
 
The Protestants point out that the Bible says God told the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve to sin that the seed of the woman would crush his head and it would bruise his heel (Genesis 3:15). If Jesus didn’t have a sinful nature he didn’t have a full humanity and so he didn’t come in the flesh they say. He wouldn’t be the seed of the sinful woman. What was said to Eve was said to all women with her as representative because the curses put on her affect all women. If Mary was sinless she would not have been included and so she couldn’t have been the mother of Jesus. God said he would put enmity between the woman’s seed and the serpent – the both would have a terrible dislike for each other. If Jesus was stronger than Satan there would no point in this bad feeling, he would only be hurting himself. The dislike was necessary for the seed needed it to fight him. So in this light the Protestants seem to be right. The Catholic Church denies the proper humanity of Christ and so it is the antichrist.
 
Some of the heretics condemned by the John writings believed there was indeed a flesh and blood man but he was taken over and possessed by Jesus, a spirit being from God or God himself, at the baptism in the Jordan and which left him on the cross leading him to cry that he was forsaken by God. They denied that the man was saviour or the Son of God or the Christ. What was these things or some of them was the being that possessed him.
 
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that bread can be turned into Jesus without any perceptible physical change taking place. It is no longer bread but Jesus. This change takes place in the Mass by the power of the priest. The Church says that what makes bread bread turns into whatever it is that makes Jesus Jesus. So the taste and appearance and weight etc of the bread remain but whatever makes it bread is turned into whatever it is that makes it Jesus. Whatever makes bread bread and whatever makes Jesus Jesus is something non-physical or immaterial. This is clearly turning Jesus into a spirit not a real body. It is as good as calling a non-change a change. Rome says Jesus can exist as a man without having his eyes, ears, smell, sense of touch and taste. The real Jesus, his substance, his nature, have nothing to do with these senses. He cannot look at you from the communion wafer he turns into. This doctrine is even more non-Christian than the notion that the heretics had that Jesus had senses but was not a man but a ghostly being or was a spirit with senses possessing a man.
 
So the doctrine of bread and wine changing into Jesus in the Mass implies that the real and essential Jesus is not a material being.

The presence of Jesus's body and blood in the Eucharist is said to be like how my soul is in every part of my body. Just as my soul is totally and equally in every bit of my body so Jesus is totally and equally present in each part of the Eucharist. Thus Jesus is not broken or divided when communion wafers are divided.

The two are not the same. Jesus' presence in the Eucharist is a presence in what is no longer alive. My soul is in my living body. My soul is not there because my body has been transubstantiated.

A soul is not a body. So the Catholics speak of Jesus's body being present everywhere in the wafer or wine. Really what the Catholics are doing is saying the bread and wine get a soul - Jesus'.

The human soul is seen as an immaterial reality - it is real but consists of no material thing. The soul is outside of space. Thus talk of it being everywhere in the body is rubbish. And few philosophers today think that the notion of having a soul makes any sense.

If bread gets Jesus' soul then it follows that Jesus has become bread! To worship the Eucharist as Catholics do is to worship bread and wine!

The Mass then has people worshipping bread and wine and pretending that it is the non-material body of Jesus and his blood. It is both idolatry and the denail of Jesus having come in the flesh.

The Bible symbolises grace as food. Grace means help from God that makes us holy and good. God helps the soul change from one kind of person to a better one. The Church says the body and blood of Jesus in communion are spiritual food and drink. They feed us with grace. But that makes no sense. We would not need the body and blood of Jesus if we only need grace. If we need the body and blood, then they are not body and blood anymore but turned into grace. But grace is not a thing. It is an effect. Again the need to eat and drink Jesus implies his body and blood are not real.
 
Many scholars believe that the condemnation of those who deny the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh refers to those who think Jesus rose not physically but spiritually from the dead. They think the coming does not mean Jesus' being born into this world but his coming back from the dead in the resurrection. In other words, he was a ghost. If so, then the Catholic Church is antichrist. It teaches that Jesus was a man but after his resurrection his body and blood were glorified and changed radically. It says that without this radical change we would not be able to believe that bread and wine could become his body and blood.
 
Whatever Jesus meant when he reportedly said we must gnaw his flesh as food it certainly was not anything like the Catholic doctrine which claims that bread turns into Jesus' flesh but doesn't claim it in any meaningful sense or in a way that makes any sense. An eye sees. If the eye disappears and is turned into a marble in the way the Catholic Church says it can happen it is not an eye anymore. End of. And if the eye is like Jesus and doesn't disappear but a marble is turned into it there is no difference. What happened to the eye's power to see which was part of itself? Gone. An eye is for seeing and a marble can never be an eye. If it cannot see anymore it is not an eye for a marble cannot see. The Jesus of Catholicism that it worships in the form of the wafer is not Jesus. We all at least subconsciously know that a marble which has been transubstantiated into an eye is not an eye and it makes no sense to say it is. Catholic worship of the wafer is really just worship of a wafer and on some level they know it.
 
Rome says that the risen supernatural body of Jesus is what is present in the Eucharist. It says there were would be problems with the doctrine were it the ordinary normal body of Jesus that were present. This is a case of solving a contradiction or absurdity by claiming that a miracle can explain it. It is no different from saying that it is a problem believing that the puddle at the top of the stairs appeared naturally so it appeared supernaturally and that solves it! The Eucharist opposes reason and undermines anything history says even if it says there was a man called Jesus.
 
According to Roman Catholicism, Jesus supposedly turned bread and wine into his body and blood before the crucifixion. If he could do that then he already had the magical body though it appeared otherwise. Thus the Docetists were right that Jesus was not a proper body but a magical apparition that could behave like a body. Thus if the Docetists were antichrists then so is the Roman Church.
 
Roman Catholicism is antichrist according to the scriptures.



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