1 John 2:18
1 John 2:1818Children, it is the last hour; and just as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. This is how we know it is the last hour.
The Watchtower teaches that the "antichrist" is not a single future figure but a collective term for all of Christendom — mainstream churches that have apostatised from true Christianity. The Reasoning book (pp. 32–33) uses 's "many antichrists" to define the collective antichrist. The phrase "they went out from us" (2:19) is applied to mainline Christianity departing from apostolic truth.
John writes "it is the last hour" — placing the last days squarely in the first century, not after 1914. He defines antichrist by two Christological tests: denying "that Jesus is the Christ" (2:22) and denying that "Jesus Christ has come in the flesh" (4:2; 2 John 7). The Watchtower uses this passage to label Christendom as antichrist, but John's own tests create a boomerang: the Watchtower's Christology — denying Christ's full deity, denying his bodily resurrection, identifying him as a created angel — catches on the very criteria John establishes. First in the NWT itself concludes: "This is the true God and life everlasting" — with Jesus Christ as the immediate antecedent. The letter's own content undermines the Watchtower's application of it.