He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, 10 and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing.
Some scholars believe that the passage contains no genuine prediction, but represents a speculation of the apostle's own, based on Daniel 8:23ff; 11:36ff, and on contemporary ideas of Antichrist.
[5][9] The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions consider the Man of Sin to come at the End of the World, when the katechon, the one who restrains, will be taken out.
Katechon is also interpreted as the Grand Monarch or a new Orthodox Emperor, inaugurating a rebirth of the Holy Roman Empire.
[citation needed] Various Protestant and anti-Catholic commentators have linked the term and identity to the Catholic Church and the Pope.