When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place: he that readeth let him understand. Matthew 24:15 DRA

The “abomination of desolation” mentioned by our Lord and recorded by St. Matthew and St. Mark (13:14) is discussed by two books of the Old Testament and alluded to in a third book.  We find it in 1 Maccabees 1:54 (57), Daniel 9:27; 11:31 and 12:11.  A very similar term is used in Daniel 8:13 and is alluded to in 2 Maccabees 6:5.

In the Koine Greek of the New Testament and the Greek Septuagint the phrase translated into English as “abomination of desolation” is “βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως” or a slight variation thereof and in the Clementine Vulgate it is some variation of “abominationem desolationis”.  These in turn, are the translations of the Hebrew words מְשֹׁמֵ֔ם and שִׁקּוּצִים֙ . שִׁקּוּצִים֙ is derived from a Hebrew verb that conveys desolation or devastation and it can also can convey a sense of shock or astonishment. מְשֹׁמֵ֔ם is derived from a Hebrew noun that means “abomination” or “detestable thing” and was often used to designate idols. 

Since our Lord referred to the Book of Daniel, let us now survey that book for the “abomination of desolation”.  

In the 9th chapter of that book we see the angel Gabriel explaining Daniel’s vision of “seventy weeks of years” (9:24), which are to result in this desecration of the temple:

And he shall confirm the covenant with many, in one week: and in the half of the week the victim and the sacrifice shall fall: and there shall be in the temple the abomination of desolation: and the desolation shall continue even to the consummation, and to the end. Daniel 9:27 DRA

We also see the phrase “abomination of desolation” in the 11th chapter of the Book of Daniel:

And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall defile the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the continual sacrifice, and they shall place there the abomination unto desolation. Daniel 11:31 DRA

In chapter 12 of the Book of Daniel a man “clothed in linen” tells Daniel:

 And from the time when the continual sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination unto desolation shall be set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred ninety days… Daniel 12:11 DRA

And, as mentioned previously, the abomination of desolation is also alluded to in the 8th chapter of the Book of Daniel:

And I heard one of the saints speaking, and one saint said to another, I know not to whom that was speaking: How long shall be the vision, concerning the continual sacrifice, and the sin of the desolation that is made: and the sanctuary, and the strength be trodden under foot? Daniel 8:13

In the 10th and 11th chapters of the Book of Daniel, an angel came to Daniel to make him “understand what is to befall [his] people in the latter days” (10:14).  The angel describes the conflict between two of the four Greek states that developed after the death of Alexander the Great.  Palestine was subject to each of these states in turn, first to the “kings of the south”, that is, the Ptolemaic monarchs (ca. 270 to 198 B.C.)  and then the “kings of the north”, that is, the Seleucid monarchs (ca. 198 to 142 B.C.) (Hahn and Mitch, study notes on 11:5-20).

Verses 21 through 45 of chapter 11 concern the reign of another Seleucid monarch, Antiochus IV Epiphanes,  who is called “one despised” (11:21). His story is aptly told in 1st and 2nd Maccabees (1 Maccabees 1:10-61 and 2 Maccabees 5:11-20).  In 167 B.C., he marched on Jerusalem, killed thousands and desecrated the Temple (Hahn and Mitch, study notes on 11:21-45).  This villain took the name “Epiphanes” meaning “God Manifest” because he claimed to be Zeus incarnate. (Drummond)

On the fifteenth day of the month Casleu, in the hundred and forty-fifth year, king Antiochus set up the abominable idol of desolation (“abominationem desolationis” in the New Vulgate) upon the altar of God 1 Maccabees 1:57a DRA (1:54 RSVCE)

The Antichrist

St. Jerome (d. A.D. 420), in his Commentary on Daniel, mentions this Antiochus IV Epiphanes, but gives a broader spiritual meaning to the prophesy:

…those of the other viewpoint claim that the persons mentioned are those who were sent by Antiochus two years after he had plundered the Temple in order to exact tribute from the Jews, and also to eliminate the worship of God, setting up an image of Jupiter Olympius in the Temple at Jerusalem, and also statues of Antiochus himself. These are described as the abomination of desolation, having been set up when the burnt offering and continual sacrifice were taken away. But we on our side contend that all these things took place in a preliminary way as a mere type of the Antichrist, who is destined to seat himself in the Temple of God, and make himself out to be as God.  (St. Jerome, “Commentary on Daniel”, 134)

St. Jerome acknowledges the correspondence to the desecration wrought by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, but says that the Antiochus was a “mere type of the Antichrist”.  “Types” are events and persons, primarily in the Old Testament, that prefigure events and persons in the New Testament.  Typology, or the method of scriptural interpretation that draws upon types, is an ancient method of interpretation frequently used by the Church Fathers.  St. Paul, for example, uses this method in Romans 5:14, St. Peter in 1 Peter 3:20–21 and it is used in the Letter to the Hebrews in Hebrews 10:1.  The Gospels presented Jesus as a new Temple, a new Solomon, and a new Moses.  Jesus employed typology in his teaching, particularly in the Gospel of John (John 3:14-15 and John 6:30-35) (Hahn). As Saint Augustine put it: “The New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.” Catechism of the Catholic Church 129  

Even if the literal sense of the “abomination of desolation” in the Book of Daniel refers to the actions of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, or to the desecration of the Temple by the Romans, St. Jerome, a Doctor of the Church, concludes that our Lord is referring to the future Antichrist.  In his commentary on the words of Jesus in Matthew 24:15, St. Jerome linked the “abomination of desolation” to the Antichrist or “man of iniquity” spoken of by St. Paul:

The apostle also speaks of this, that the man of iniquity and the adversary is to be lifted up against everything that is called God or that is worshiped. He will dare to stand in the Temple of God and show that he himself is God, that his coming in accordance with the working of Satan destroys them, and that it reduces those who received him to a devastation, void of God.  Now this can be interpreted either literally of the Antichrist, or of the image of Caesar that Pilate placed in the Temple, or of the equestrian statue of Hadrian, which stands to the present day in the very location of the holy of holies. According to the old Scripture, an “abomination” is also called an “idol,” and this is why “of desolation” is added, because an idol will be placed in the desolated and destroyed Temple…” The “abomination of desolation” can also be understood of all perverted doctrine. (St. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, 271-272)

An even more ancient extra-biblical testimony regarding the Antichrist may be found in the 16th chapter of the Didache (“The Lord’s Instruction to the Gentiles Through the Twelve Apostles.” , A.D. 80-90) which addresses this teaching of our Lord in the 24th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew (“The Didache”):

Watch for your life’s sake…when lawlessness increases, they shall hate and persecute and betray one another, and then shall appear the world-deceiver as the Son of God, and shall do signs and wonders, and the earth shall be delivered into his hands, and he shall do iniquitous things which have never yet come to pass since the beginning. (Roberts et al.)

The Man of Sin

In his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, St. Paul calls the Antichrist the “Man of Sin”:

Let no man deceive you by any means, for unless there come a revolt first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, Who opposeth, and is lifted up above all that is called God, or that is worshipped, so that he sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself as if he were God.  2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 DRA

In his book, “City of God” (Book 20, Chapter 19), St. Augustine of Hippo (b. A.D. 354), a bishop and Doctor of the Church, commented on this specific verse :

No one can doubt that he wrote this of Antichrist and of the day of judgment, which he here calls the day of the Lord, nor that he declared that this day should not come unless he first came who is called the apostate – apostate, to wit, from the Lord God. And if this may justly be said of all the ungodly, how much more of him? But it is uncertain in what temple he shall sit, whether in that ruin of the temple which was built by Solomon, or in the Church; for the apostle would not call the temple of any idol or demon the temple of God. (St. Augustine)

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

The Roman Catechism is silent on the matter of the Antichrist, but the Catechism of the Catholic Church has this to say about the topic:

Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism. Catechism of the Catholic Church 675-676

The Catechism of the Catholic Church de-emphasizes the person of the Antichrist and focuses on his deception, which it describes as a pseudo-messianism. We shouldn’t doubt that the Antichrist will offer or impose a pseudo-messianism but what will be that “abominiation of desolation” that will shock and horrify as the original phrase in Hebrew signifies?

The Eucharist and the Antichrist

What sacrifice could possibly be usurped by the Antichrist? What “continual sacrifice” will be taken away (See Daniel 11:31)? The sacrifice at the center of Christian worship, established by our Lord Himself, is the Eucharistic Sacrifice, where the sacrifice of Calvary is re-presented at every Mass. With this obviously in mind, a short while after St. Augustine, in a document entitled, “De Consummatione Mundi” (“On the End of the World”), the Pseudo-Hippolytus wrote:

And the churches, too, will wail with a mighty lamentation, because neither oblation nor incense is attended to, nor a service acceptable to God; but the sanctuaries of the churches will become like a garden-watcher’s hut, and the holy body and blood of Christ will not be shown in those days. The public service of God shall be extinguished, psalmody shall cease, the reading of the Scriptures shall not be heard; but for men there shall be darkness, and lamentation on lamentation, and woe on woe. (Pseudo-Hippolytus 34)

“Pseudo-Hippolytus”, by the way, refers to a collection of writings that were originally attributed to St. Hippolytus of Rome but are now considered to be the work of an anonymous author who lived later, likely in the 4th or 5th century.

Conclusion

Apostolic teaching based on the words of Our Lord and upon the Sacred Scriptures, points to a future Antichrist, likely a world leader, who will claim divinity for himself and desecrate public worship and possibly ban the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, substituting for it something that may be called the abomination of desolation.

Works Cited

“The Didache.” EWTN, https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/didache-12503. Accessed 26 January 2025.

Drummond, John. “Antiochus Epiphanes—The Bible’s Most Notoriously Forgotten Villain.” Biblical Archaeology Society, 2 January 2025, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-israel/antiochus-epiphanes-the-bibles-most-notoriously-forgotten-villain/. Accessed 24 January 2025.

Hahn, Scott. “Typing Tutor by Scott Hahn – St. Paul Center.” St. Paul Center, 2 September 2015, https://stpaulcenter.com/typing-tutor-by-scott-hahn/. Accessed 24 January 2025.

Hahn, Scott, and Curtis Mitch. The Ignatius Study Bible: Daniel. Edited by Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch, Ignatius Press, 2013.

Pseudo-Hippolytus. “De Consummatione Mundi.” Edited by Alexander Roberts, et al., translated by J.H. MacMahon. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, 1886. New Advent, Buffalo, Christian Literature Publishing Co., https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0504.htm.

Roberts, Alexander, et al., editors. “The Didache.” The Lord’s Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations. Translated by M. B. Riddle. Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1986. New Advent, Buffalo, Christian Literature Publishing Co., https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0714.htm. Accessed 26 January 2025.

St. Augustine. “City of God.” Edited by Philip Schaff, translated by Marcus Dods. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2, 1887. New Advent, Buffalo, Christian Literature Publishing Co., https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120120.htm. Accessed 26 January 2025.

St. Jerome. Commentary on Daniel. Translated by Gleason L. Archer,, Jr., Grand Rapids, Baker Book House, 1958.

St. Jerome. Commentary on Matthew. Translated by Thomas P. Scheck, Catholic University of America Press, 2008.