Calling Christ Antichrist
Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.
The final alternative deliberately exceeds the ordinary claim that Jesus was mistaken or that Christianity was a human myth. Chesterton has provisionally accepted the critics' accumulated charges and asks what could explain such an extraordinary concentration of evil. ‘Antichrist’ supplies the suitably extraordinary opposite, making the paragraph a reductio of that accumulated portrait rather than a freestanding demonstration that only two accounts of Jesus are possible.
The biblical term needs care. In 1 John 2:18 there are already many antichrists; in 2:22 the designation belongs to the person who denies that Jesus is the Christ. It is not an alternative identity offered to Jesus himself. Chesterton recasts this language into a pointed Christ/Antichrist antithesis. A closer narrative parallel to the suggestion that Jesus came ‘from hell’ is Mark 3:22–30: the scribes explain his exorcisms by demonic agency, and Jesus replies that Satan acting against Satan would destroy his own kingdom. That is a useful comparison, not an identified quotation or demonstrated source for Chesterton's sentence. The wording was checked against the King James Version (first published 1611), both in the local Project Gutenberg transcription and, for the linked passages, Bible Gateway's digital KJV. 1 John 2:18–22; Mark 3:22–30.
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