2 John 7
2 John 77For many deceivers have gone out into the world, refusing to confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.
The Watchtower uses 2 John 7 — "many deceivers have gone forth into the world, persons not confessing Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist" — as part of a broader polemic against "Christendom." In the rs framework, the "many deceivers" are Trinitarian Christians who have corrupted apostolic teaching, and the "antichrist" label is deployed collectively against mainline denominations. The verse pairs with ("they went out from us") as prophetic description of Christendom's apostasy from the first-century true church.
John tells you exactly who the antichrists are, and they are not mainline Protestants. The test in 2 John 7 is specific and first-century: denial that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. The opponents John is writing against are docetists and proto-gnostics who denied that the Christ-spirit truly took on a real physical body. opens with exactly that emphasis — "what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and our hands have handled." That is anti-docetic language, not anti-Nicene language.
Every historic Protestant confession — Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal — affirms that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. By the text's own stated content, these traditions are not what John is describing. The test John actually supplies is narrower than the rs book uses it, and applied consistently it catches the Watchtower's own Christology in a different way: the antichrist test of denies "Jesus is the Christ" and "the Father and the Son" — and in the NWT ends, "This is the true God and life everlasting." The boomerang is in the text.