I remember numerous people declaring that former US president Barak Obama was probably the anti-christ spoken of in the book of Revelation. I heard it regularly from different corners during his eight years in office. Then, when Donal Trump was elected, I started to hear the same thing about him. A quick google search shows that numerous books and articles were published about both of them. Here are a few of the covers:
I had assumed this was a more recent phenomenon driven by the sort of dispensational millennialist eschatology that is popular in parts of America. Reading Dante today though, I discovered a much older case of it!
In Canto III of Paradiso, Dante meets Constance, mother of Frederick II, one of the last great Holy Roman emperors. Though she is in heaven, she is remembered for breaking her vows to be a nun and leaving her convent to marry.
It was believed in Dante’s day that she was at one time a nun and had been taken from the convent against her will, in order to be married to Henry VI. The marriage took place in 1185, when Henry was 22 and Constance about 32. Their son was not born until nine years later. His enemies, who sought to identify him as the Anti-Christ, seized on the story that his mother had been in a convent, for according to an ancient prophecy the Anti-Christ would be born to an elderly nun.
-from the Sayers/Reynolds commentary on Paradiso III.109
I don’t know where this idea that the anti-christ would be born to an elderly nun came from, but it’s not so different than contemporary ideas like that The Mark of the Beast being a computer chip implant. Who knows. Still, in the middle ages having your first son at the age of 41 would have indeed been a bit unusual so it apparently served as a good enough excuse for Frederick’s political opponents to cast shade on him about 800 years ago.