Naming the Anti-Christ?

The importance of Biblical scholarship and valid teaching is accentuated with the advent of podcasts, YouTube and church websites. Here is an example of a video that has been viewed by almost two hundred thousand people:

An interesting video does not always mean that it should be trusted. This is one of the many reasons you want your pastor to go to seminary and study the original languages. When stuff like this comes out it is certainly worth your time to ask the questions--is it true and trustworthy? The scholarship of this video is an interesting attempt to link Barack Obama to the anti-Christ. There are several red flags concerning the validity of the claims in this video. The first one rises in studying the verse under discussion, Luke 10:18. In context, this is not a verse about the anti-Christ, but it is a warning to the seventy-two disciples that Christ was sending out to preach the truths about the kingdom of God (just as the 12 were commissioned). Jesus is warning them against the demonic/satanic forces they will face. This quotation of Jesus is an allusion to the Isaiah 14 passage about Satan, but the emphasis is Jesus' authority over Satan and the demons they will face on their journey. Jesus was literally there when Satan fell from the sky like lightning. Another huge problem is found at the very end of the clip. There is an admission that we do not know exactly what Jesus said in Aramaic. Aramaic and Hebrew are closely related, but they are not the same. The author of the video speaks as though there are no issues and what Jesus spoke would have been in Hebrew. The evidences are the Hebrew words and roots, but those may not be the words spoken by Jesus. There are also many words for high place, as the word he uses (bama is one of them), but I would think the word used for heaven or sky (shamayim) would be more likely to be used here. It is all based on speculation of what Jesus might have spoken in Hebrew, but he would have spoken it in Aramaic in the first place! This issue is in addition to the contextual issues which clearly show that the verse is not prophetically speaking about the anti-Christ or end times at all. Rather, it is a warning to his disciples (the 72) about Satanic forces in opposition to their journey whom he has authority over because Jesus is the Word who was present at creation and when Satan fell from his "high place." This verse is about Jesus' authority over Satan not about the identity of the anti-Christ. Obama may or may not (probably not) be the anti-Christ, but this is certainly not proof. Also, the Lord gave us the Bible in the form that he did as revelation to his people (that includes us!). It is not a code that we have to trace back and try to figure out what Jesus "actually" said. His message is recorded in Greek by Luke accurately (see Luke 1:3-4) so we may know with certainty the things Jesus taught. What is spoken about in the video is again speculation and conjecture and is NOT the certain things that Luke recorded concerning Jesus' life and teaching.