Big Brother & Your Privacy

666 and the Mark of the Beast

John, who penned the Book of Revelation, wrote this about the Beast:

"He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666" (Rev. 13:18).

The VeriChip (right), now being advertised for use in tracking humans, has been approved for implanted (subdermal) human use by the FDA.

There are all sorts of nonsensical speculations being thrown out nowadays on how to identify the number of the beast, i.e., 666. In contrast, the writings of the early Christians make it crystal clear that the phrase, "the number of his name," had a concrete meaning to John's readers—it was not something strange or speculative to them.

The key to the correct understanding of the number 666 is the phrase in Revelation 13:18 that refers to "the number of his name." You see, neither the Greeks nor the Romans had numbers as we know them today. Rather, their letters of the alphabet were also their numbers. (In contrast, today we use Arabic numerals.)

The Greek alphabet-number system is fairly easy. The first letter, A or alpha, is also the number 1. The second letter, B or beta, is 2. This continues down through the alphabet until we reach 10 (which is I or iota). The next letter, K or kappa, is 20. The letter after that is 30 and so on until we reach 100 (which is R or rho. It looks like capital P. Then the next letter, s or sigma, is 200, etc.

The Greek numeral system used at the time of the New Testament was based on the Greek alphabet that was in existence around 500 B.C. That earlier alphabet included three letters that were no longer in use by New Testament times.One of these was digamma, the letter that represented the number 6. It was written like a capital F.

Now, we must remember that neither the Greeks nor the Romans had any concept of decimal places. In other words, an A is always 1, regardless of where it appears in the sequence of a number. Our decimal system came centuries later from India, through the Arabs.

With the Greek-Roman system of numbers, you can immediately see that every word was also a number. Or more precisely, we can say that every word had a numerical equivalent. For example, ABBA = 1+2+2+1. This is not 1,221, but 6 (associated with man). If we changed the letters around to BABA, it still would add to 6. Remember there are no decimal places.

Consequently, every person's name was also a number. So when John speaks about "the number of the beast's name," he is saying that when you treat each letter in the Antichrist's name as a number, those numbers will add up to 666. Not 6-6-6, but six hundred sixty-six. You can't take the letter for 6 (digamma) and write it 3 times. That would equal 18, not 666. Remember, there are no decimal places. Nor are we limited to the letter for 600 (khi), the letter for 60 (zie), and letter for 6 (digamma). That would certainly work, but we are not limited to that. We could take tau (the letter for 300) twice, then the letter for sixty (zie), and the letter for 6 (digamma).

There's literally thousands of possibilities. Because there was no decimal system, a whole host of names could add up to this number. For example, we could take the letter, alpha, 666 times, and that would equal 666. Or we could take the letter beta 333 times. Or the letter gamma (3) 111 times. Of course, those wouldn't be real names. But I think you can see the drift of what we're saying. Now, let's look at some real names.

Irenaeus, an early Christian bishop, wrote this about the number of the beast's name:

If there are many names found possessing this number [666], it will be asked which of them will the coming man bear. I do not say this because of a lack of names that contain the number of that name. Rather, I say it out of fear of God and zeal for the truth. For the name "Evanthas" contains the required number, but I make no allegation regarding it. Then also "Lateinos" has the number. ..."Teitan," too,...is rather worthy of credit. For it has in itself the predicted number. ...However, I will not incur the risk of dogmatically announcing the name of the Antichrist. For if it were necessary that his name should be distinctly revealed in this present time, it would have been announced by him who beheld the apocalyptic vision."

Note: EVANTHAS = in English E-V-A-N-T-H-A-S. In Greek, we have the letters: epsilon (5), yoopsilon (400), alpha (1), nyoo (50), theta (9), alpha (1), and sigma (200). This adds up to 666.

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