Preterists believe that prophecy of the Antichrist was fulfilled in A.D. 70, and that the Roman emperor Nero was the Antichrist. In his book The Apocalypse Code, Hank Hanegraaff takes issue with the premillennial view that Emperor Nero was a poor excuse for the Antichrist. Hanegraaff writes:
[Nero] was a maniacal megalomaniac who built a statue to himself more than a hundred feet tall and enshrined it in the Roman temple of Mars, demanded to be worshiped as “Almighty God and Savior,” castrated a young boy named Sporus and married him with pomp and ceremony, delighted in homosexual rape and sodomy, kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death, and exhausted the imperial treasury for his personal pleasures.
So was Nero the Antichrist?
I certainly do not want to deny that the Roman emperor Nero was a wicked and evil man. There have been many of those down through the centuries. We can think of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. They were pretty bad people, too. But being evil, wicked, and corrupt does not make one the Antichrist any more than being very good makes one Jesus Christ.