benja burns

In a recent thread people were talking about the number of the beast being 616 and not 666. I told this to my dad and he found this quote from Irenaeus:

"Now such being the state of the case, and this number being set down in all the good and old copies, and testimony being given by the persons themselves who had seen John with their eyes, and reason teaching us that the number of the name of the Beast, according to the reckoning of the Greeks, by the letters therein, will have 600, and 60, and 6....some, I know not how, have erred, following a particular reading and have taken liberties with the middle number of the name, subtracting the value of fifty, and choosing to have one decade instead of six."

My dad said that the quote is from the second century (he didn't say an exact date) and that Irenaeus was a student of Polycarp who was in turn a student of John the Baptist. Is all that true? Also, why has there been such a controversy over whether the number is 616 or 666?

pharoah

Perhaps he, or you, meant John the Disciple (not the Baptist)? In any case, there's no reason to believe that John the Disciple wrote Revelations.
.
Differences in manuscripts.

Julian

Probably John the Elder is the John being discussed here. He could be John the Evangelist.

Julian

Amaleq13

It is the secret code from which one may identify anti-christ in human form. If you don't have the right number, you won't make the right identification.

benja burns

Yea, I meant John the Disciple. My bad.

How do you decode it and find out who it refers to?

Ben C Smith

Plug and try.

The variant 665 is also known from at least one manuscript. But 666 and 616 are intriguing because the former is the number for one of the Hebrew spellings of Nero Caesar while the latter is the number for a Greek spelling of Nero Caesar.

The legend of Nero redivivus is possibly relevant here. Also possibly relevant is Revelation 17.10, in which the current king is the sixth. The ancient lists of Roman emperors generally began with Julius; the sixth king, therefore, would be Nero. Unfortunately, Revelation does not explicitly identify the beast as the sixth king; it merely says that the beast is one of the seven (17.11).

Ben.

FatherMithras

Why would Julius be the first king? Do they consider him a king despite not being an Emperor?

The Colourful Jester

That's about right. One's for the Devil, the other for the Tooth-Fairy.

I believe alot of Death Metal bands are ticked by this.

premjan

Is it because the European Plague was in 1666?

general_koffi

No... The Revelation was written a long time before that.