vilest Jew, shall not rest satisfied, by becoming the universal king of the whole earth … but he shall immediately enter into the impious and sacrilegious thought of making himself God, and the only God of the whole earth … Whereupon shall arise the most terrible, the most cruel perilous persecution against the church of Jesus Christ; and it shall last for three years and a half … Upon his death the church, and the whole world, shall begin to breathe again, every thing reverting to a perfect calm, and a universal joy. The Bishops, who had concealed themselves in mountains, shall return and resume their sees, accompanied by their clergy and some other Christian families, who had followed them in their voluntary exile. At this time shall come to pass, the conversion of the Jews, according to the universal spirit of the converters". Although this view – that the Antichrist was an individual who would be a Jew – was first formed by fellow Jesuit Francisco Ribera in the latter part of the sixteenth century, this was a far from universal view on the identity of the Antichrist, as until this time it had been completely rejected by Protestants. "In 1540, Basque knight Ignatius Loyola and a handful of followers received permission from Pope Pius III to form the order of the Jesuits, who would provide shock troops for an intellectual assault on Protestant beliefs. While the Roman curia maintained its traditional Augustinian reticence on things apocalyptic, it occurred to the Jeuits that the reformers were surprisingly vulnerable in this area. If they could show that Luther, Zwingli and Calvin had ignored the Apocalypse, they could cut the ground from under Protestant feet and present themselves as the defender of scripture. Their immediate task was to break the connection between Antichrist and the papacy. In around 1580, Spanish Jesuit Francisco Ribera began work on a commentary on Revelation, which challenged the 'historical' Protestant analysis of biblical prophecy. Abandoning the literal thousand year millennium, he focused on Daniel's 'a time, two times, and half a time,' if 'a time' represented a year, he concluded, then the period added up to three and a half years – or 1260 days. Uncoupling Daniel from Revelation, he argued that only John's letters to the churches [in the Book of Revelation] in the first three chapters referred to events that happened in the past.