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In honor of the 666th episode of the podcast, Trent and Jimmy break down what the book of Revelation says about “the beast” and the “number of its name” – or 666.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to free for all Friday here on the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. I just realized that this is episode 666 of the Counsel of Trent Podcast. For a lot of people, when they see 666 pop up, if they’re familiar with the Book of Revelation with scripture, they might recoil and think, “Oh, the 666. That’s the mark of the beast. That’s danger. That’s something to look out for.” Or at least it’s something mysterious. They know there’s something bad related to it, something related to the beast, something that’s diabolical.
What should we think about 666, the mark of the beast? Maybe I should have done this 50 episodes ago. You’ll find out why as we discuss the number or mark of the beast. But I thought this would be an interesting topic to delve into in free for all Friday. To help us do that is someone who’s written on this subject. I really appreciated his insights. He is Jimmy Akin, senior apologist of Catholic Answers. Jimmy, welcome back to the Counsel of Trent.
Jimmy Akin:
Hey, glad to be here, Trent.
Trent Horn:
All right. So let’s jump into this. People will talk about 666 and that comes from Revelation chapter 13 talking about the beast, at least the first beast, the vision of John in the Book of Revelation. So maybe we could give, we’ll just go all the way back before we get narrower and narrower, understanding what the Book of Revelation is because it’s a very mysterious and symbolic book in scripture.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. There are different approaches to how it’s interpreted. Now, one of the things that John tells us, and he tells us this in the very first verse of the book and he reiterates it at the end of the book, is that this vision was given to him to show Christ’s disciples what must happen soon. So that kind of gives us a framework for interpreting the book. It’s not to say it doesn’t have application to our future, but at least most of the book should be something that would be happening soon from the perspective of John and his 1st century audience.
Everybody agrees that the first part of the book is talking about events at the beginning of Christian history, like the messages to the seven churches of Asia. That’s clearly 1st century application. Everybody agrees that the end of the book applies to events that are in our future, like the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment. But the question is, what about the middle of the book, chapters 4 to 19? How do those apply to history? Is that past or is that kind of spread out over church history or is it in our future?
The statement at the beginning of the book and at the end of the book, that this is going to happen soon, means at least our initial interpretation should be that the bulk of the book, that middle portion has at least its primary fulfillment early in church history. That’s not to say that it can’t have a secondary application at the end of history because prophecy often has multiple fulfillments, but our initial interpretation of the primary fulfillment should be early in church history.
When we read that material, we find that it does. We learn about, in chapter 13 of the book, John sees a couple of beasts, wild animals that one of them emerges from the sea and one of them emerges from the land. The one that emerges from the sea has certain characteristics. It has parts of a lion, parts of a bear, parts of a leopard and it’s got 10 heads. If you know your Old Testament that straight out of Daniel 7. In Daniel 7, Daniel sees a series of four beasts who have those characteristics and they represent empires that have had great geopolitical success and that have persecuted Israel.
They’re the Babylonian Empire, the Medo-Persian empire, the Greek Empire and so forth. So when John sees this beast from the land, it should be the same kind of thing. So it would be a successful 1st century geopolitical empire that persecuted Israel. Who would that be, Trent?
Trent Horn:
Well, I can’t think of too many others except maybe-
Jimmy Akin:
Could it be Rome?
Trent Horn:
Dun, dun, dun. Well, right. We think about all of the persecution that the Jews in Palestine were facing, that they were able to practice their religion though under heavy constraint and restrictions based on Roman occupation of the Holy Land. But you’re right, because you look in Revelation 13 talking about the beast, it was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, blasphemies against God and it was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them. So that’s talking about the first beast and then it moves on to talk about the second beast.
But when I read it, it’s always hard for me, Jimmy, when you read a lot of this stuff, if it sounds like very obvious, Oh Rome, even talking about seven hills in Rome, that fundamentalist Protestants will say, “Of course it’s Rome, the Roman Catholic church.” I’m like, “Ah, you lept over the obvious thing to get to the one that was incorrect.”
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. Also on their view, the Roman Catholic church didn’t even exist in the 1st century.
Trent Horn:
Oh, that’s a good one.
Jimmy Akin:
So it couldn’t be the the Catholic church.
Trent Horn:
Oh wow. I think I’m going to make this meme. There’s a meme of a hero and he’s fretting about pressing two buttons.
Jimmy Akin:
I’ve seen that.
Trent Horn:
Both of them are undesirable consequences. So one should be the Whore of Babylon is the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church didn’t exist until the 4th century. You can’t hold both of those. So yeah, let’s talk more then about that. This does seem to point a lot towards the evil of the Roman Empire.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. The second beast, the one that comes from the land is… What it does is it encourages people to worship the first beast. Of course, there were people in the 1st century that literally worshiped the Roman emperor as a God. The second beast fits very well with the cult of emperor worship from the 1st century. We’re also told that the first beast who just becomes called the beast, we’re told that he persecutes Christians and apostles. Of course, Rome was responsible for the martyrdoms of St. Peter and St. Paul and so that fits. We’re told that the seven heads of the beast represent both seven mountains or hills and seven kings. of course, Rome is famously built on seven hills. Vatican Hill is not one of those.
Trent Horn:
That’s right.
Jimmy Akin:
Vatican Hill is on the wrong side of the Tiber River to be one of the seven hills of Rome. Then the seven heads we’re told five of them have fallen. One is and one is yet to come and will reign only a short time of the seven kings. So these would be the Roman emperors. The first five Roman emperors were Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. So those would be the five who have fallen. The book was then written during the reign of Nero’s successor, Galba, who reigned about seven months.
Then he was followed by Otho and Otho reigned only three months. So he did indeed reign only a short time. So it looks like, based on this, at least in my opinion, others have different opinions, but in my opinion, the Book of Revelation was written during the reign of Galba in late ’68 or possibly January of ’69.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, that’s interesting because a lot of scholars will put Revelation very late, possibly even into the early 2nd century. But I’m compelled by a lot of these arguments that even the entire New Testament itself could have been written before the fall of Jerusalem. That’s interesting where you dated here in relation to the emperors.
Jimmy Akin:
There are other reasons I put it before AD 70 as well because the temple was destroyed in the Jewish war of AD 70. John speaks of the temple in Jerusalem as in Revelation as if it’s still functioning. So I think that’s a second line of evidence that shows us this book was written early.
Trent Horn:
So then it goes through and talking about signs and other issues that are related to the second beast. It causes all both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and enslaved to be marked on the right hand or the forehead. This is Revelation 13:16 through 18, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark that is the name of the beast or the number of its name. In Revelation 13:18, it says, “This calls for wisdom. Let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast for it is a human number. Its number is 666.” Curiouser and curiouser.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. A human number is not really a good translation there. I mean, what would a human number even mean? I mean, either all numbers are human or no numbers are human. There’s not a distinct class of, “Oh this number is a human number and this other one isn’t.” It doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Literally, or what the Greek would say or if you were to translate it more word for word from Greek, it would say, “This is the number of a man.”
Trent Horn:
Oh, arithmos gar anthropou, for a man’s number.
Jimmy Akin:
The number of a man, yeah.
Trent Horn:
Number of a man, yes.
Jimmy Akin:
So that is the way most people have taken it, that it’s the number of a man’s name. That may sound a little strange to contemporary English speakers because we have our ABCs and our 123s. We have different letters and numbers, but in the ancient world they didn’t. In the ancient world, the letters of the alphabet doubled for numbers. So alpha was one, beta was two, gimel was three and so forth. The same thing was true in Hebrew and Aramaic. Alef was one, bet was two, gimel was three and so forth, yod was 10 and so forth.
Oh, there’s one other clue I should mention about the heads of the beast. It says that one of them suffered a fatal wound but then seemed to come back. That fits with a 1st century motif called Nero Redivivus or or the return of Nero. Nero was declared a public enemy by the Roman Senate in the summer of ’68 and he then committed suicide saying, “What an artist dies with me,” because he fancied himself a great singer and poet.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
But then, even though he had been declared an enemy of this state, his immediate successors including Galba and Otho modeled themselves on Nero. So even though Nero was gone, it was like Nero was still around somehow. In fact, Otho even called himself Otho Nero to make the link with Nero explicit. So that also fits with what we see about the beast. So if we have this line of 1st century Roman emperors and they persecute apostles, and Nero did that because it was during his reign Peter and Paul were killed, if you have this one notable head that’s dead but still somehow comes back and you say, “Okay, does any of these guys have a name that would add up to 666?”
Because John says at the end of Revelation 13, he invites his audience, he says, “Let the wise one calculate this.” So this is something that you could calculate. If you were in John’s 1st century audience and you were smart, you could figure out the number of the beast. That also tells us the beast existed in the 1st century, because if the beast didn’t exist in the 1st century, there’s no way John’s audience could have calculated its name.
So anyway, you got this 1st century line of Roman emperors that want to be worshiped as gods, or at least some of them did. It persecutes apostles. You got the head that dies and comes back. Does any of these have a name that adds up to 666? Yes. Nero Caesar. If you take Nero Caesar in Hebrew or Aramaic, which use the same alphabet and the same numbering system, it’s typically spelled Nrwn Qsr. I won’t say all the names of the Hebrew letters, but the N in Nero has a value of 50 in the Hebrew Aramaic numbering system, the R has a value of 200, the W has a value of six, and the second N has a value of 50. So Nrwn is 50, 200, 6 and 50.
Caesar is spelled Q-S-R, Qsr. The Q has a value of 100, the S has a value of 60 and the second R has another value of 200. So you add all that up and Nrwn Qsr becomes 666. This has convinced most scholars that the number of the beast is a reference to Nero.
Trent Horn:
There’s also some manuscript issues though with this first, some of them refer, say that the number of the beast is 616.
Jimmy Akin:
Correct. There are a few manuscripts that have the number of the beast as 616. That’s easily explained by a variant spelling of Nero. Now, in the version that I gave, which we do know was used in the ancient world, there’s an extra nun or N added to Nero, so it becomes Neron. That’s something that you sometimes have to do in languages because the rules of a receiving language may not allow a word to end with a vowel. So you got to slap a consonant on the end, for example.
There was another alternate spelling of Nero Caesar without that extra nun, without that extra N. So it was just Nero Caesar, Nrw Qsr. Since the value of N is 50, you dropped 50 off of 666 and you get 616 for the spelling just Nero Caesar. So it looks like someone in the very early church, 1st and 2nd century, knew that this was Nero and they preferred an alternate spelling of Nero and they used the alternate spelling and they adjusted the number accordingly.
Trent Horn:
Well, I think this is really helpful and insightful because a lot of people, I think, because of modern evangelicalism, especially think the late ’80s and ’90s and ’70s, focusing on Revelation and as being these cryptic clues to talk about World War III. We’re right, Revelation does talk about future events, but I think sometimes people can get really myopically focused in reading this, always rushing to map it onto a present event.
Like the idea that the mark of the beast, you won’t be able to buy or sell is going to be some kind of microchip, a one world government will put in our hands or on our forehead. How do you think people should soberly look at Revelation when trying to apply it to these kind of more modern questions?
Jimmy Akin:
Well, it’s possible that there will be a future mark of the beast. If so, it should be essentially what the mark of the beast was in its primary fulfillment back in the 1st century. So we need to ask ourselves, well what was the mark of the beast in the 1st century? One of the things that people today tend to get hung up on is the assumption that it’s a literal mark, like a tattoo or a brand. Or today people would add a microchip, but they didn’t have microchips in the 1st century. They did have tattoos and brands. Sometimes if you had a slave, you might brand him or tattoo him with your name to say he’s mine.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Devotees of various pagan deities would also do the same thing. They might have their pagan god’s name written on their heads. Well, how should we understand this one? Well, there is background to this and there’s an important parallel to this in Revelation itself that most people completely overlook. But to give the background, in Ezekiel 9, now, one of the things you find when you study Revelation in depth is that its symbolism heavily comes from the Old Testament. It is not simply stuff that comes out of nowhere.
The vision draws extensively from the Old Testament, and you really need to know your Old Testament prophecy to figure out Revelation. Well, the mark of the beast is paralleled by an event or something else in Revelation. Actually, it’s paralleled by an event that we read about in Ezekiel 9. In Ezekiel 9, the Lord is preparing to judge Jerusalem and the Lord says to an angel, “Pass through the city through Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abomination that are committed in it.”
To the other angels, he said in my hearing Ezekiel records, “Pass through the city after him and strike. Your eyes shall not spare and you shall not show pity but touch no one on whom is the mark.” So here in Ezekiel 9, we see God putting a mark on the righteous people of Jerusalem to protect them from the coming devastation that is carried out by angels.
Now, in Hebrew, the word used here for mark is tau, and tau is one of the letters of the alphabet in the Paleo-Hebrew, it’s the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the Peleo-Hebrew script that was used when Isaiah and Ezekiel were written, tau looks like a pair of crossed lines, like an X. That’s a very easy mark to make and so it became the word for mark. So what’s happening is the protecting angel is putting a pair of crossed lines on the forehead of all the righteous men. He’s putting a cross on their foreheads. This was noticed by the early church fathers, that the people in Ezekiel, the righteous ones are being marked with the sign of the cross.
Trent Horn:
The sign of the cross, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
That is echoed in Revelation. It’s echoed in chapter 14 of Revelation. When you start reading chapter 14, John says, “Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising sun with the seal of the living God and he called out with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm the earth and sea.” So notice again, we’ve got kind of protecting angel and some harmful angels saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads and I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000 sealed from every tribe of Israel.”
So we have the same situation as in Ezekiel 9. You have a judgment that’s about to happen, but first, an angel goes through the territory that’s to be judged and marks God’s faithful people so that the angels will not hurt them. That’s the direct parallel to the mark that’s on the 144,000. It’s also described as the name of God and of his son. So we’ve got these people in. One more piece of background before I pull the trigger on the payoff for this.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Jimmy Akin:
But one more piece of background is there’s a work that was written in the second temple era. It comes from the 1st century BC, so it’s before the time of Christ. It’s called the Psalms of Solomon. In Psalm of Solomon 15, it draws on this mark imagery and it says, “For God’s mark is on the righteous for their salvation,” that’s like in his Ezekiel 9, “famine and sword and death shall be far from the righteous for they will retreat from the devout like those pursued by famine, but they shall pursue sinners and overtake them. For those who act lawlessly shall not escape the Lord’s judgment. They shall be taken as by those experienced in war for on their forehead is the mark of destruction.”
So here in Psalms of Solomon, we see two marks. There’s a mark on the wicked, that’s marks them out for destruction, and there’s a mark on the righteous that marks them out for protection. Okay, in Revelation, we have two marks. We have the mark of the beast in chapter 13, we have the mark of the righteous in chapter 14. Guess what? In Greek there are no chapter breaks. If you don’t stop reading at the end of chapter 13, the very next sentence gets us into the discussion of the 144,000 in their mark. In the original, it’s just seamless. You pivot instantly from hearing about the mark of the beast to hearing about the mark of the righteous.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, well, let me read that for people [inaudible 00:22:36]. This calls for wisdom, let him who has understanding reckon in the number of the beast for it as a human number, its number is 666. Then I looked, and low, on Mount Zion stood the lamb and with him 144,000 who had his name and his father’s name written on their foreheads.
Jimmy Akin:
Right. So there’s a clear contrast between these two marks in Revelation. It’s obscured by the chapter break that got added later. But it’s an instant pivot in Revelation. So we’re meant to understand these two marks in parallel. So the mark on the righteous, as we heard, is to protect them from the coming judgment. The mark of the beast marks the other people as belonging to the beast and they’re going to be victims of the judgment.
Now, there’s another aspect to this and we know that it’s the false prophet, the second beast that puts this mark on them. It’s part of the worship of the first beast. So this would be a sign that these are emperor worshipers, that these are people who participate in the cult of emperor worship. It also mentions the ability to buy and sell being related to whether or not you worship the emperor. Well that happened. I won’t go through them all, but there were a variety of ways in which if you didn’t worship the emperor, it harmed your business prospects.
In fact, by the year 250, there was a Roman emperor who was requiring people to get a permit in order to buy and sell. The condition for the permit was he had set out incense pans in public spaces and you had to be willing to, with your hand, take some incense, throw it into the incense pan and burn incense or sacrifice to the emperor’s genius. So you had to participate in the cult of emperor worship in order to get a license to buy and sell and you did that with your hand. There were early church fathers like St. Hippolytus of Rome who connected that to the beast, to the mark of the beast.
Now, one of the things that people today have, as I said, gotten hung up about is an assumption that the mark of the beast is going to be something physical. But was that the case in the 1st century when its primary fulfillment occurred? The answer is no, neither. None of these marks in the literature is a physical mark. They’re invisible spiritual marks that are put on by angels in the case of the marks of righteous. By participating in false religion in the case of the mark of the beast or by sins in the case of the mark of the wicked from the Psalms of Solomon.
So understood in their 1st century context, these marks were invisible spiritual marks. They were not literal physical things. If the future mark of the beast, if there is one, is like the first mark of the beast, it would be the same thing. It wouldn’t literally be a tattoo or a brand or a microchip or other things that have been proposed like credit cards and social security cards and vaccines. It’s none of those things. It’s an invisible spiritual mark that identifies your spiritual allegiance.
You’re either allied with God and you worship him, in which case you get the mark of the righteous from an angel, or you’re allied with the beast, you worship a false political leader as a God in place of God and that’s what gives you the mark of the beast. So it’s possible that in the future there will be a future Nero-like emperor that people will worship as a god and those people who worship him will have the future mark of the beast. But we shouldn’t be looking for it as if it’s a literal physical thing.
Trent Horn:
Right. Because you think in Revelation 14:1, when people read that, the 144,000 who had his name and his father’s name written on their foreheads, we don’t think that when someone is saved, they’re going to literally have Yahweh or Jesus written on their foreheads. We understand that it’s a spiritual designation.
Jimmy Akin:
Right. I should also point out that it’s widely believed, I’m not 100% convinced of this myself, but it’s widely believed that the 144,000 are simply a symbol of the entire church. On that interpretation, it would apply just to all Christians.
Trent Horn:
Right. So that when you’re saved, the indelible mark of grace that we receive in baptism on our souls, once again, it’s not a physical mark, but it does leave a stamp, if you will, upon our souls and showing who we are with and who we are for. So I think that’s super helpful. But Jimmy, thank you so much for being on the show. I think this will illuminate a lot of parts of Revelation that people can be confused about or overly anxious about. If there’s any other resources on this you’d like to recommend or you want to direct our listeners to more of your own resources, definitely feel free to share them with us.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, I did an entire episode of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World on the mark of the beast. So just go to mysterious.fm and you can look that up and hear an even fuller discussion with more information.
Trent Horn:
All right. We’ll definitely check out Mysterious World Podcast. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure.
Trent Horn:
Thank you guys for listening and I hope that you all have a very blessed weekend.
Narrator:
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