Peter as Antichrist

The Apostle says first comes a falling away, then is revealed the man of sin, the son of perdition, the Anti-Christ. First came the falling away from the holy faith by the Tsar Alexis in the year 666 [1666], the number of the beast thus fulfilling the prophecy. And after him there reigned on the throne his first-born son Peter, from his second and unlawful marriage. He was consecrated to the throne of all the Russians by the Jewish laws from head to foot, showing that he is the false Messiah and the false Christ, as the Sibyl prophesied about him that a Jewish Tsar will reign. And that false Christ began to set himself up and be called God by all, persecuting and tormenting all Orthodox Christians, destroying their memory from the face of the earth, spreading his new Jewish faith throughout all Russia. In the year 1700, to the accomplishment of his wickedness, and on the festival of the Circumcision of Christ, he called together a heathenish court and erected a temple to the heathen god Janus, and before all the people practiced all sorts of magic rites and all called out "vivat! vivat! the New Year," and he sent to all parts of the realm the command to feast for the new year, thus breaking the laws of the Fathers, who in the first Ecumenical Council commanded the feast of the New Year to be on September 1. In the year 1721 he took upon himself the Patriarchal title, calling himself Father of the Country, Head of the Russian Church, and Autocrat, having no one on an equality with himself, taking craftily to himself not only the power of the Tsar, but also the authority of God, and claiming to be an autocratic pastor, a headless head over all the opponents of Christ, Anti-Christ. Therefore must we conceal ourselves in the deserts just as the Prophet Jeremiah ordered the children of God to flee from Babylon. The years of the Lord have passed; the years of Satan have come.

From "'"The Old Believers: 'The Antichrist.'" As reproduced in Peter the Great, ed. Eugene Schuyler, vol. II (New York: Russell & Russell, 1884; 1967), 153-154.
From Mosaic

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