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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As one nears the end of a long project, especially a project about the end of the world, it is hard to resist the sense that the time to settle accounts has come. Many debts have accrued. I have been thinking about Paul and Antichrist for ten years, in one way or another, and so many people have left an impression upon some part or another of this work that I cannot imagine calling all of them to mind to thank them properly. So I will offer thanks to those to whom I owe the most obvious debts, sure that my memory has failed and some have been left out. Thanks to my colleagues at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion, now reborn as the Martin Marty Center, at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where I was a junior fellow for the 1995–96 academic year and wrote a substantial portion of the dissertation that was the seed of this book. Thanks, too, to my Chicago friends and colleagues, now scattered around the country, who made graduate school (of all things!) such a delightful time of life; Robert Wilson Black, Patricia Beckman, Gordon Rudy, Charles Mathewes, Sam Portaro, Richard Rosengarten, Dante Scala, and Susan Schreiner all had a hand in this project in some way or another, and I am deeply grateful. At Villanova University, I have had the support and guidance of John Doody, Arthur Chappell, and Bernard Prusak, and I have depended upon the friendship of Thomas W. Smith, Martin Laird, William Werpehowski, and Anthony Godzieba. Thanks are due to Gregory LaNave at The Catholic University of America Press for helping me navigate the publishing world and to my copy editor, Carol Kennedy, for bringing some consistency and harmony to the x book. Special thanks to Kevin Madigan, who read the entire manuscript , and to E. Ann Matter, who, in addition to reading the entire manuscript, has helped me with this project in so many ways over the years. My deepest thanks are for my parents, Gerry and Leo, who taught me to love learning, and for my wife, Bridget. When we were just getting to know each other, Bridget inspired me to re-read the Letters of Paul, so without her inspiration, this project would never have come. But even this is petty change compared to the way she inspires me as a human being with her uncanny wisdom and keen insight. Together we are raising three daughters, Rachel, Sarah, and Elizabeth, and all together, these women in my life have kept me rooted through all the aerial flights of academe, reminding me every day that there is much more in heaven and earth than I have dreamt in my theologies. Or my histories. In some ways, this is a book about a tradition of learning, and so I am dedicating it to my teachers, John C. Cavadini and Bernard McGinn. John was my first teacher in college theology, my perpetual scholarly resource through graduate school, a reader of my dissertation , and my constant inspiration for more than fifteen years. Bernie’s mentoring has given me whatever scholarly virtues I may have, and I hope to continue learning from him to add whatever I have missed along the way. Portions of Chapters 3, 4, and 6 have appeared as “Augustine and the Adversary: Strategies of Synthesis in Early Medieval Exegesis,” Augustinian Studies 30:2 (1999): 221–33, and in the introduction to Second Thessalonians: Two Early Medieval Apocalyptic Commentaries, Haimo of Auxerre, Exposition in Epistolam II ad Thessalonicneses; Thietland of Einsiedeln, In Epistolam II ad Thessalonicenses, Steven R. Cartwright and Kevin L. Hughes, eds. TEAMS Commentary Series (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press, 2001). The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint revised versions of these works. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / xi ...

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